Baits are always fillets, unless we get a finicky mako, in which case we offer him a "bloodworm" (a bluefish or bunker would work), a butt hooked mac that has had its tail cut off at the nub. They vibrate insanely and squirt blood like hell and I have never had a mako refuse one. Most of the time the fillet gets eaten and we don't need the worm.
My pitch bait leaders with the fillets on them are not overly large (the fillets that is) and the nose is pierced by a fillet clip and the hook placed toward the rear of the fillet, again for fast hooking fish to be released, which all usually are. At the same time, the fillet pins get the hook down deep quickly on a fish that we want to kill. Fillets, as opposed to whole baits or huge ones, are a piece of cake to set a hook thru and it's a rare shark that refuses them.
If we tease up a blue shark, we ignore him. There are very few blues around here anymore, so we rarely get any up nowadays. If we do we simply cast the live teaser/s past them and the blues rarely ever bother them again, I guess because they stick with the source of the chum and don't range back where the teasers are swimming - even though we don't run them way back.
As stated at the top, we had huge numbers of blues out here before the finners wiped them out and I originally came up with this system so that we could almost entirely eliminate catching them and instead, catch nothing but makos and threshers. It worked and works. It is almost impossible to catch a blue this way if everything is done the way described here. Any boatside blues usually depart as a mako of any size comes to the boat chasing a bait. If any of them don't split, a hungry mako will beat them to the pitch bait every time, especially since it is alongside and can be pulled away from any blue shark crazy enough to get in front of a feeder mako (not many are, even the big ones, which wouldn't get big if they did that kind of crazy shit!)
I rarely just drift while I'm chumming. I power chum the vast majority of the time and especially when there is little wind or current. This allows me to work breaklines, canyon edges, high spots and to follow the twists and turns on current breaks, even to the extent of staying just on the side with the right water temps and bait. I don't worry about the chum slick. I think it follows the source no matter whether you are drifting or power chumming.
All of the above keeps us in the fish zones and that is a lot more productive than just letting wind and current decide where we are going to fish. It also allows me to "hover" over and around a concentration of bait and sharks and also make circles in those areas so that we stay on the fish and don't drift on past them, which a lot of traditional chummers do. Power chumming also allows me to have the props kicking out white water and vibrations as I go in and out of gear and that attracts sharks, no doubt in my mind.
