C-Hook article, Big Game Journal

[Captain Fred Archer]

From an article published by a The Big Game Journal. Sorry, no picts here. I don't know how to add them to body text. They will appear on our website when this article is posted in a few days.

CIRCLE HOOKS IN SO-CALLED “MARLIN LURES”? YOU BETCHA!

Picture omitted

A CaboTiger, scorpion rigged with a circle hook.

In today’s world of reduced billfish populations and skyrocketing fuel costs, a couple of things have become more and more important. First, we have to do our best to make sure that we don’t kill or injure caught and released marlin and other pelagic species so badly that they die later, or become shark fodder. Second, because it costs so much more in fuel to run to most marlin grounds, we need to capitalize on any shots that we get from billfish, especially marlin. For me, I want to catch them all and I have always thought that there was a better way of doing it the way that myself and everyone else was doing it before circle hooks came along and I have always relentlessly searched for it. And once finding it, looking for the next change that would help me toward my goal.

There will be those who don’t believe it, but they will be the same ones who fought the use of circle hooks in bait, most of whom have made the happy discovery that everything that the “crazy people” who pioneered them said about them was actually true. Yes, I was among those “crazies” like Tim Choate and Raleigh Werking who took a lot of heat from the masses while we preached the benefits of circle hooks to our disbelieving brothers. My first books, written over fifteen years ago, touted circle hooks and I relentlessly recommended their use for years while hearing basically nothing but boos and catcalls from most fishermen. Now they are widely accepted and if anything, guys who don’t use circles in their live and natural baits are looking like the crazies, a not-so-hot thing for them, but a good one for the fish and many fishermen too.

GOAL NUMBER ONE

Let’s be realistic here and admit right up front that making the most of every shot we get at a marlin or the other pelagic fishes that we fish for is more important to most of us than conservation. As long as the conservation issue comes in a strong second, that’s okay with me. And if we could do both – increase our hookup and landing ratios on the vast majority of the marlin that we raise AND do it in a far less harmful way than ever before, we would have one of those “win/win” situations that are always good.

Enter circle hooks in artificial lures, both “marlin lures” and spreaderbars. I have kept detailed logs on the fish that we caught down in marlin-rich Cabo, during which time I experimented with a large number of hook rigs in an effort to find the best for raising the abysmally low ratios that were traditional with the single and double hook rigs of the past. My hookup ratios and more importantly, my landing ratios were nigh onto 100% on the circle hooks in lures and the spreaderbars designed for marlin fishing, as are those of the tiny number of others who I know that run the circles in the fakes.

3 Pictures omitted

MarlinBar with 9” squids running. A smaller MarlinBar with 6” chasebait.

STIFF RIGGED “SCORPION” AND “TAIL GUNNER” ARE GOOD

The only J hook numbers that approached the circles, and they too were almost impossibly high, came with the scorpion rigged stiff J rigging and the different way that they should be fished. Those who have read New Secrets of Modern Trolling and my new marlin book know all of the details of that technique. It's only drawback was that it injured some fish very badly that might not have made it after release. Not so with the circles and as one who has only been personally responsible for killing three billfish that I know of (not including swordfish or spearfish and some of the released fish might have died later) out of the thousands that I have caught or captained on, that is very important to me personally. Killing marlin is like killing mockingbirds as far as I'm concerned and is something that I have avoided doing for all of my life, beginning long before "marlin hugging" became the vogue. It is a personal feeling on my part and I make no judgements about those who chose to kill their fish, unless they are wasted. The circles produced mind-bending hookup and landing ratios too. For those of you who say, "So what were they?", my reply is the same as it always has been...you would not believe me if I told you, so I'm not doing it.

BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER, WHAT IS A MARLIN LURE ANYWAY?

Danged if I know. Oh, yes, I make what many call “marlin lures”, but I call them what the are, “trolling lures”. That’s simply because those so-called marlin lures catch all kinds of pelagic fish, not just marlin. And just like you can’t catch just marlin on trolling lures, you can’t write an article like this one without taking into consideration those other fish too, so you are going to be reading about the other species that hit so called “marlin lures” too in this piece. So read on, because circle hooks in lures are mighty good medicine for those other fish too.

FROM LURE, TO TEASER, TO LURE, TO “GOT YA!”

One of the beauties of a lure rigged with a C hook is that if a marlin or any other fish misses getting hooked up on it - and some do, of course - they don't get jabbed or ripped in the face or mouth by a sharp hook or hooks. Visualize that for a second. Say you were hungrily biting down on a nice, fat cheeseburger and as you were, you were suddenly jabbed in the mouth with a big, sharp needle, or worse yet, had one go in a ways and then rip its way out of your mouth. Would you take another bite? I think not and the same thing happens with goodly numbers of J-jabbed marlin and other fish.

When a marlin misses a C hooked lure he doesn’t get jabbed or dragged. That lure now becomes a "bait" (teaser) that the gamefish has hit and injured that has somehow "escaped" and the apex predator marlin's - like a lion or a tiger's - instincts take over and it focuses 100% on catching and killing his “injured but escaping” victim before another predator grabs it. And with a circle hook he can miss a couple more times and the only thing that happens is that he ratchets up to the most intense fish fury and determination that you have ever seen, with blue marlin cranking their already frightful attack aggression up to absolutely astonishing levels that I cannot describe and that you will only believe when you see it for yourself!

Leave 'em alone and don't screw around doing anything but driving straight and watching the show and you will wind up hooking that insane fish. And because he's on a circle hook, he will be yours.

RIGGING CIRCLE HOOKS IN LURES AND SPREADERBARS

Many pictures omitted

C-hook rigged scorpion style on GraveDigger with tail gunner C-hook on wire
a GataGordo lure. for wahoo country or shark trolling.

How I stiff rig a lure circle hook – so it The stiff rig for a tail gunner circle hook is also
can swing, roll and wrap around the jaw locked into the head. The hook, which you will
hinge or bone. see in the above picture is rigged so it too can
do “the swing thing”.

Here is how I rig hollow squids with circle hooks with the hook and leader exposed.

I place my hooks in the head/eye area of the squids and I put it just behind the head with the scorpion rig on lures too. I do this because I believe that area to be the primary target of (especially) billfish that attack squid. This is because they are "Grab, Crush, and Gobble Feeders" and grabbing the hind end of a squid will just give it a proverbial "hot foot" and is far more likely to cause that squid to squirt and split, instead of turning into a meal. Ditto on the front of a big squid. A bloody nose and high speed departure would be the usual result of that sort of bite attempt. But a "Grab and Crush" of the central nerve bundle in the eye area or crushing the head/gill area of a fin bait prove to be the best of all knockout punches here, so that's where marlin bite lures and that’s where I put my hooks. The whole strike sequence happens so fast when a marlin takes a trolled lure or nails a SuperBar chasebait that for me at least, it is almost impossible to actually see what happens, even from up in a tuna tower. What tells the tale and did many times to me are the bite marks on the chasebaits and the lures. They clearly show that the area I'm talking about is the one that marlin almost always target.

THE SWING IS THE THING

It is critically important that the C-hook is free to swing and "lay down" when a billfish or other fish bites down on it. It allows the hook to “flop over” when the marlin goes to crush the bait and it is then (if the hook point is dull, so it doesn’t stick the fish while it is moving) free to slide across the mouth to the jaw corner or rim of the mouth. This is one of the keys to a circle hook hookup on lures or spreaderbar chasebaits. Trying to mount a C or J hook in that location and allowing it to swing in the middle of plastic lure skirts, or worse yet, that stringy nylon stuff on Islander-type lures that I personally don't care for is a wide open invitation to skirts wrapping up in hooks and messing everything up. That just doesn't happen when a C hook is rigged the way that we rig them in squids, with the shank inside the hollow body and only the business end of the hook peeking out. All of the above are among the reasons why I vastly prefer SuperBars to trolling lures.

Before we go any further I want to re-state how important it is to remember the great difference between a J and a C hook. The J is designed to cut through and penetrate marlin flesh, inside or sometimes outside the mouth (especially those double hook snag rigs) and in eyes at times and unfortunately, in gills or guts at other times.

As I say in my books, Circle hooks are like a monkey, ahem, mating with a football (you know what I mean,right?), in that they are designed to wrap themselves around something and hang on like hell. Heck, like the monkey, a circle "does the nasty" too, only in this case that means helping us beat up a fish. (It's a good thing that monkey/football thing doesn't result in offspring, or we might wind up with fuzzy little, Mutant MonkeyBall Mongrels that bounce funny when kids try to play with them and that keep jumping on their legs and doing the nasty! ("Mommy, mommy! Something's wrong with my MonkeyBall, Thumper! He keeps grabbing my leg and wiggling around making grunting noises, like a piggy!")

Seriously, though, the differences between how J-hooks and C's hold onto fish for us are huge, which brings me back to the hook rigging difference. As far as marlin are concerned, I put the hook where I said I do and the way that you see them below. Of course, being a charter captain whose clients are interested in both billfish AND meat, I have to use lures that appeal to all of them. So, while I designed some of our SuperBars especially for doing a number on billfish, they also catch the poo out of the meat fish too. The hook location that I use is also ideal for the "Slasher" types, like dolphin and wahoo (the 'hoo target the eye area at regular to pretty fast trolling speeds, but take out the tail when they are after true high speed stuff and in those cases, you better have a fanny hook to nail them with).

The tunas are also "Engulf and Gobble" feeders that generally come in from below and behind and just, well, engulf and then swallow a lure fast. Here, a tailgunner style hook rigging will work, but the bad side of that one is that if it's a J-hook, many times it's going to hook the fish deep, which is okay if you are killing every one that you catch, but not good if you fish under limit constraints and release a lot of fish like we often did, fish that you want to survive. Here, the head-placed C-hook is the better arrangement - again, because it will hook them all, including the tunas, but it will almost always do "the monkey/football thing", instead of the stab and slash. So, I go with the hook-in-the head area.

As for what hooks the fish - fishermen or the boat, all that I can say is that on my boat, it does the hooking, not the crew or passengers. I learned long ago that the best way to hook virtually every marlin that comes to a spreaderbar or grabs a trolling lure, especially natural feeling ones like mine and Moldcraft’s, is to do nothing, unless you are bait and switching with it. Leave that fish alone on an armed bar and he'll grab that chasebait, usually immediately, because bluffing or spooking a clear target out of the "school" that the teaser pods on a MarlinBar represent is exactly what that fish is hoping for and as soon as he sees it, he's got it and you've got HIM! Ditto on the trolling lure, which presents an easy to see and target lone baitfish, in my case, always with a Moldcraft Little Bird two or three feet in front of it, so it usually gets taken immediately.

When it comes to smaller striped and white marlin and sails with their smaller mouths and especially on the bigger lures or squids, a tailgunner J or C can easily wind up outside of the fish's mouth when he grabs and crushes the bait. That raises the chances of not hooking him when the boat pulls the lure out of his mouth, or he does that himself by swimming away or to the side. Here too, the head hook gets every one of those fish, or darned near every one and none are snagged like on a single, tailgunner J, or worse yet, a double hook snag rig that is as dangerous to the crew, and maybe moreso to them than to the fish.

As far as ballyhoo are concerned, I run all of mine under "HooHats". I swim them and the hats help keep them from blowing out and washing out and getting damaged at my usual trolling speeds of 8-10 or even 12 knots. Yes, they run well at those speeds. I do miss more fish on them and go for and get more re-bites on them than I do the SuperBars, so I haven't done a helluva lot of experimenting on the ballyhoo side, like I have lures and bars. The bottom line there is that, believe it or not and go ahead and knock them if you want to, even though you haven't used these very different bars, I catch the vast majority of my billfish and everything else for that matter on them. Long story short there, I am watching with interest as you guys who rely on ballyhoo a helluva lot more than I do play with and come up with different C-hook options for them.

That's about it for now, I think. Keep a sharp eye out for those fuzzy, mutant MonkeyBalls and if you come across one, don't take him home and let the kids play with him. Depending on his testicular status and general attitude about life, you might let old Rover play with it...hell, he might LIKE it!

CONFUSING “THE BAIT WAIT” TO A LURE STRIKE ON A C-HOOK

I believe that the single biggest reason why, and maybe even especially why those who use C-hooks in baits have a hard time believing that they would work in lures is a direct result of the mantra that bait fishermen go by – “You need to let a marlin or any other fish eat that bait, maybe even swallow it and then turn and swim at an angle or away in order for the circle to go to the corner of its mouth or jaw and catch it.” I don’t happen to buy into that with the bridled baits that I fish with, but that’s another story for another article. Short and sweet, the point here is to not get all hung up over the fish "needing to eat the lure", "or getting it well into its mouth" and the "turning away so that the C hook slides into the corner of their mouths" speculations by those who haven't fished C's in lures extensively.

“SLOW AS MOLASSES VERSUS AS FAST LIQUID LIGHTNING”

In a nutshell, that is the difference between a bait bite and one on a trolled lure and it is critical to understand the difference if you are going to develop the confidence to rig and use C-hooks on lures. First and foremost, one has to recognize that the physical dynamics of a trolled marlin or other fish coming in at their usual wharp speed, which is invariably faster than the lure, and attacking a lure that is traveling at seven to twelve knots. Those dynamics are radically different than those involved in that same fish coming in and scooping up a dead or live bait, no matter what kind of hook it's on.

Compared to a troll lure bite, a bite on a drifted or slow trolled live or dead bait is done in virtual slow motion, while in contrast, everything that happens in the trolling scenario happens far, far faster. Everything from the speed of the bite, to the crushing of the lure, even to swallowing it happens in a flash during a troll bite on a lure compared to a bait bite. One of those differences is that the hook is set by the angler on the bait bite, while it is usually set by the boat on a troll bite. These differences in bite dynamics are important to recognize and remember when we consider the how's and why's of billfish, or any other kinds of fish strikes on C-hook bearing lures. The differences are, in fact, vast, not minute and in the case of the "grab, crush and gulp" feeding marlin versus that same fish slurping down a bait are both considerable and key to hooking them.

FORGET THE DEAD OR LIVE BAIT “C-HOOK RULES”

The second thing to learn and remember is to forget the techniques and even the type of C hook used for a bait-eating marlin or other fish, versus the right kind for a fish that has run down and has seized a trolled lure. It would be extremely foolish to use the popular Eagle Claw circles that were developed for bait fishing on lures. First, because of their "built in" rapid decomposition in salt water. That's fine in a bait hook, but not in a lure one for what should be a glaringly obvious reason - the constant re-rigging of such lures that would be required in the first place and the missing of fish that hit ones unchanged yet, but too degraded to function properly in the second. So no bait hooks in your trolling lures, please.

MATCHING C-HOOKS TO THE JOB

Circle hook sizes are very different than J-hook sizes. The circles are consistently smaller than the same numbered J-hook. For example, a 12/0 J-hook is a big hook, while a 12/0 C-hook is a lot smaller. So, the rule of thumb is to use at least twice the size C-hook, in this case a 16 or 18/0 hook in a lure that you normally run a 12/0 J-hook in. If you bridle your live or dead baits, like we do, you can go with one size up in the C-hook. I advise that you experiment and find what size your personally have the best success with. As most know, but it bears repeating, non-kirbed models only when it comes to C-hooks.

RELEASING HEALTHY BILLFISH

I take releasing billfish seriously. Other species too. I did not allow marlin or sails to be killed on my boat and my crew and I did our best to make sure that every one that we released was healthy and unharmed. Part and parcel of that is that we did not allow those "Harry holding his marlin in the boat" pictures. Too many fish get fatally injured that way, so if anyone wanted a picture of their marlin on my boat, they had to take one with the fish in the water and they had to do it fast.

Our regular procedure was to use a small, dull gaff to slide the lure up the leader, grab it and the leader in one hand and pop the hook out with an ARC Dehooker, or cut mono leaders instantly with a quick swing of the leader cutting tool that we use, the same device that paramedics and firemen use to quickly cut auto seatbelts free of accident victims. The fact that we use wind-on leaders with short lure leaders attached to them frees up both of the leader man’s hands so that he can slide the lure up with one hand, grab it and the leader and then use the Dehooker or cut the fish off close to the hook with his other hand if it is a wild one that we don't want to risk having injure itself or us if we try to take the hook out of him.

Circle hooks are cheap (the ones that I use, at least) and they are simply swaged onto the lure leader as far as rigging is concerned, so the loss of the hook is no big deal and is well worth it as far as making super-healthy releases is concerned.


WHAT ABOUT THE HOOKS THAT WE LEAVE IN THE FISH?

I don’t worry much about that, especially since I completely remove the barbs from my circle hooks. This is a habit that I got into when I discovered how hard circle hooks can be to remove from fish. Taking the barbs off makes that job a snap once you learn to twist and back the hook out the same way that it went in, or I should say "around", the jaw. I still take the barbs off on the lures that we are going to cut the leaders on, or leaders that we might have to do that on if a billfish hits them. I think it takes very little time for the fish to shake that barbless hook during his regular feeding, free-jumping, etc. activities, but at the same time, the barbless hooks hold great while you are fighting fish. And remember, one of the beauties of circle hooks is that they almost always hook the fish in the corner of the mouth, where they do little or no serious damage and are easy to get at.

Okay, that’s it for now on circle hooks. Let’s move on to the deadliest and most fun way of fishing for all of the pelagic fishes, bait and switch fishing...ooh yeah!

END OF ARTICLE

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