C-hooks in artificial lures

[HOLWACHAGOT]

Thanks again for the info Captain Fred! Very cool insight. The monkeyball...HAH...your a hoot! Thanks again and keep it coming. Plenty of people are reading it.
Holwachagot

[Captain Fred Archer]

Here's my last one on this subject for a while.

A BETTER WAY TO BAIT AND SWITCH MARLIN

I have been both bait and switch fishing and experimenting with and refining it for a very long time and have wound up making some big changes to the way I used to do it. I doubt that many will buy into this, but one or two might and it will help them catch more marlin, especially if they have smaller boats without large crews.

First and foremost, and the biggest change of all was to quit trolling single and daisy chain teasers and switching over to schools of bait teasers to eliminate marlin from zeroing in and getting focused on a single, vulnerable baitfish, like a single lure or the last teaser in a daisy chain represents.

The goals
To raise fish with lots of “bait”.
And then to present them with a natural feeding scene that they predictably and naturally react to, meaning that they jump on the pitch bait as soon as it is presented.
This should, and does result in a very high percentage of fish raised being hooked quickly and efficiently.

THE SCHOOL RULE

The single most important fact to take into consideration when it comes to baitfish, be they 3” sauries or even baby squids, all the way up to seventy or eighty pound yellowfin that the biggest blue marlin feed on is, THEY ALL TRAVEL IN SCHOOLS because other than their natural color camouflage, which is also enhanced greatly when they are in a school of the same exact color and size companions, they have no other form of defense. And so the issue of schooling is not only important, it is paramount to take into consideration.

That being the case, it is likewise important to recognize the difference between the way that a marlin approaches and reacts to single targets versus schooling ones. A single baitfish, which a lure teaser or the last one in a daisy chain line clearly represents to a marlin, is an anomaly in the natural world because single baits swimming around all by their lonesome are rare indeed in the world of hunting that marlin are accustomed to. The good side can be that if you do manage to raise a marlin to a single lure teaser or chain, it is likely that he will take it as an unusual prey opportunity and zero in and go after that single bait. That’s all well and good if that lure is armed, because you get a shot at hooking that fish, but it’s not good if it’s a teaser that he gets focused in on that keeps “getting away from him”, which often drives the fish nuts and he becomes even more focused on the teaser and all of the problems that can and do come about because of that.

IT’S A WHOLE DIFFERENT BALLGAME IF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TEASERS OUT

Divers like Guy Harvey and my friend Carlos and even some marine biologists who have observed marlin feeding behavior over and over from under the water will confirm that billfish approach a pod of bait far differently than they do a straggler or other bait that has fallen out of the school. In the case of a bait pod with no clearly defined target outside of it and in sight, marlin make “bluffing runs” at the pod and light up over and over again in what those same people will tell you are obvious efforts to flush an individual target, or in the case of them turning their lights on and off, in an attempt to blind or otherwise stun a school member into making a wrong turn, popping out of the pack and immediately getting targeted and gobbled.

The critically important points here are that a raised marlin does get intensely focused on a single bait that repeatedly gets pulled out of its mouth by the boat’s momentum, or pulled away from him by an excited teaser man. Worse yet, some fish, especially blues, but not them exclusively, will get a death grip on a single lure and one of those tugs of war takes place between the fish and the leaderman. Meantime that fish often ignores the pitch bait and the other “by their lonesome” baits that are being run back in the pattern. None of this is good and while highly experienced bait and switch crews in venues where they basically practice bait and switch on a year-round, or near year-round basis and especially if there are a lot of sailfish and not so many blue marlin present (the sails, especially Pacific’s, usually being extremely persistent teaser fish) get very good at the single lure or daisy chain teaser game. And to be fair, there are a few crews around who do pretty well with switching blue ones, but too often those big, wild creatures crash a single teaser and are flat gone before anyone can do anything other than maybe go, “Holy shitoley, didya see THAT?”

Most of us fall into the category of not fishing in year-round billfish venues with tons of fish for us to sharpen our skills on, so the less complicated bait and switching can be made to be, the better...as in WAY better if we change over to running those bait pods, instead of the single lures, be they straight singles, or that last teaser that becomes a target on a daisy chain and a spreaderbar with a chasebait too.

I developed this technique and the right kinds of bars to use down in Cabo, where I did a lot of bait and switch fishing for fifteen or more years. And I did that in spite of crew guys who were as good at the standard way as any, anywhere, but still I wasn’t happy with the fact that we missed good numbers of fish that we should have caught. This was especially so for the blue marlin, but problems with the single lure game cost us some striped marlin and sails too. And so I developed marlin fishing capable spreaderbars and we started bait and switching with them and the positives immediately showed, even on those big blues. We wound up raising marlin and sails that just kept rushing and flashing at the schools the bars represented that time after time literally jumped all over the pitch baits the moment that they appeared to have been spooked out of the bait pod.

No pitch baits too far back, or too close, or next to the teaser or in front of it, no tugs of war, no bad drop backs. No, none of that. Heck, we didn’t even cast the pitchers back to the sails and small stripers like we used to do with the other kind. Instead, we pre-measured the amount of line it took for a pitch bait to wind up a couple to a few feet behind (and slightly to one side) of the bait pod and threw them underhand out and at right angles to the boat, letting its momentum swing them out and back. This not only gave a precise dropback distance and placement, it let us fish the reels in gear, which was important with this method because of the instant nature of the bites that we got. The backlashes that would happen at least part of the time – especially when inexperienced anglers were on the pitching sticks on this kind of bite had to be avoided.

Here a drawings of two versions; one with a bar on each corner and one with two bars, side-by-side That’s if for now.

[Captain Fred Archer]

Lots of looks, not many comments. I'm really not surprised or even disappointed, since this is such a very different approach to a game where the traditional stye itself is new territory for many and what I am trying to pass on here is very different and probably has many doubters, or at least some who are leery about wandering from the "tried and true of the new", so to speak.

When it comes to that tried and true stuff, though, please bear in mind that I have done it both ways for a very long time now and I learned the traditional way from the pioneers and the best in the business at the time. And my first marlin book, appropriately with "Alternative Tactics" being part of the title that was written fifteen years ago described the basic bait and switch technique that is still being used today. And it also recommended circle hooks, too. More importantly, I have used the "school teaser" method for many, many years INSTEAD OF the other way, which as I have written here and as those who have known me for a long time know my crew was very, very good at. It was and is good, but not good enough.

When it comes to fishing techniques, etc., I have always advised my readers that, "If it is logical and makes sense on the natural side, absolutely give it a try because it probably works. If, on the other hand, it doesn't seem logical and doesn't make sense in the world of the fish, it probably isn't worth wasting time on."

Let's take a sec and start cold and apply logic and natural fish behavior to this bait and switch game and the "single lure or even daisy chain (which does not mimic any kind of bait school that I have seen in all of my years on the water and which I believe functions basically as a single lure, with the last teaser being the logical target once the fish arrive)" versus the "natural schools of bait in defensive postures" one.

I for one buy completely into what video after video shows of how marlin "work" a school of bait and what divers like Guy Harvey have observed time and again and has video'd (and that I have posted here) and what my diver friend Carlos has seen - exactly the same that Guy has - and what biologists who have gone in the water and studied feeding fish say too. I have seen this too, only from my tuna tower down in Cabo, where one gets to see one helluva lot of marlin feeding on bait schools. Heck, there were more than a few occasions when I saw a big blue chasing schools of dolphin and tunas and both the "bait" and the marlin did the same stuff that the little guys do.

The bottom line is that all bait travels in schools for protection and gamefish have to bust those schools up or spook them somehow to cut out visible targets.

If you buy into what these people all tell us, that marlin harrass bait schools, trying to break them up or spook a school member or two out of the pod so that they can target and eat it and that the opposite happens when there is a single target or a straggler already out of the school (a single teaser, the last teaser in a daisy chain, or the chasebait on a spreaderbar) when the marlin arrives, that is a good, logical start. In the latter case, the fish does what comes naturally to him and he focuses on and tries to eat that single target. Since there is no hook in it, he can't get it, although some big striped marlin - whitey's kissin' cousin - will grab and run with a teaser and in my case at least, way too many blue ones grab the teaser and at the very least, the standard "tug of war" takes place between the guy on the teaser and the blue - IF there is guy on the teaser and he is paying attention and IF he knows what to do.

Let's stop here and think about what's going on. Our objective is to feed a fired-up marlin a bait or lure in a natural manner that will trigger his usual feeding instincts. But what we have in many traditional bait and switch situations is a marlin that is not only fixated on that single teaser, if he has grabbed it and it has "escaped" and reappeared, his competitive instincts and prey drive are going to push him over the edge and he will turn himself inside out trying to catch and kill "that damned escapee" and will not "switch" to a pitch bait, sometimes even when the teaser is removed. It doesn't happen all of the time, but it happened often enough to us that I changed what we were doing and virtually eliminated tugs of war and billfish focusing on anything other than the pitch bait, a clone of what is in the school that he is harassing AND NOT GRABBING, right onto his dinner plate. It is the first viable and eatable target that the fish sees and with nothing else distracting them or pissing them off, they chug that pitcher down, right now!

Other really good things about this approach are that, if it is a pod of stripers or whites that comes in on the bait schools, the others remain and continue to harass the school/schools and they will literally fight over each bait that you "drop out of the bait pods that they are harrassing" to them. It is utterly logical - as long as your "bait schools" stay intact and in defensive formations (God help you if you don't have the dimensions right though!), raised billfish will try and try to break them up for so long that it is going to literally blow your mind at first and until you get used to it, there will be times when you are watching a fish you just hooked jumping his ass off and someone will suddenly say, "Holy cow! There's another one on the teasers...no! Two!" (Remember, with this technique you never have to pull the teasers away from a fish, and so you can take your time doing it.) If you want to get into a tug of war with one, go ahead and drop a teaser back behind the bait schools.

'Course, that'd be kinda silly, if you asked me. Maybe even illogical, if you stop and think about it. If it were me in that scenario up there, I'd do what I always do and drop a bait to one and stick him, then drop a bait back to the other one and stick his ass too. I'm a lot more into catching fish than I am playing tug of war and making fish harder to get to take a bait than it has to be.

I'm sure that the silence will remain deafening, but I'm hopeful that some of you are seeing the pure, simple, natural logic here and that you will skip over the old way and adopt this new one, or at least give it a good shot. You won't be sorry, I promise! And I'd bet a bundle that if you do try both, you'll be doing the bar thing 100% of the time after that.

And for those who might think that this is some kind of a spam job to sell more MarlinBars, instead of what it really is, an effort to help fellow fishermen who haven't been lucky enough to have spent the time on the water and experimenting and learning among the many fish that I have, hear this. I am about to bow out of the spreaderbar business, except maybe for selling some components that no one will be able to find if I don't make them available. I am getting too old and infirm and there have been some other things that I can no longer deal with, so I'm saying "Sayonara and Adios" on the bars. Sure, there will be a business left, but it will be a mere shadow of what in reality the little thing that really was. That's okay with me, though. Like the charter business, writing books and magazine articles and such, it was never about money that some fools here think just rolls in for guys in those businesses anyway.

It has always been about the love.

Nothing more.

[Barefootin]

Guys,
What style of c hook would you use on a skirted lure with dead bait? I hear of small and large gap circles, octopus and sickel.
Is there a style (brand) of circle hooks that are preffered for trolling these rigs and provide a better chance of a hook up?
I use the Mustad Demon & Ultra Point circles but they do not look all that different from some modified j hooks.
Bill, What would you use with the Matanza and bally?
Thanks

[Squidnation]

Originally Posted by Barefootin

Guys,
What style of c hook would you use on a skirted lure with dead bait? I hear of small and large gap circles, octopus and sickel.
Is there a style (brand) of circle hooks that are preffered for trolling these rigs and provide a better chance of a hook up?
I use the Mustad Demon & Ultra Point circles but they do not look all that different from some modified j hooks.
Bill, What would you use with the Matanza and bally?
Thanks

I have not tried circles with the matanza yet but I am going to this year. The open top half of the lead should make it easy to rig so as that you don't lose the rig every time you catch a fish. I will rig one up the way I think will work but until I try it I have no idea. I am thinking about a wire tie so the hook is fastened above the head.

As far as skirted hoos with a sea witch or something. I would rig them the same in this video and pull the hook in front of the seawitch.

Not many people meatfish or use skirts with circle hooks but the few the few pros that I have fished with all say lite drags are the key. So you really need to be paying attention when that tuna blows up on the skirted bait.

[Captain Fred Archer]

Footin'

I am the weirdest duck on the pond in most things and that is true with the C hooks that I use in lures. They are commercial longliner ones, non-offset and with the barbs removed. I also use much bigger hooks than most others. I can't tell you what sizes they are because I don't remember and besides, size numbers aren't standardized yet.

When it comes to running circles on lures with bait, I don't do much of that, other than the strip baits, Spanish and ballyhoo that I run on what I call "HooHats" and under ProSquid pitch baits. Here too, I run much bigger hooks than most. The strip baits are easy and I just use the very same hooks that I use in the all-artificial lures with them.

If I'm feeling lazy I run J's in the 'hoos and Spaniards. It is too much to get into here, but if I'm serious about using the C hook in a bait on a lure I have a way of bridling it that works well, but takes time to rig.

Here's a look at a CaboTiger rigged for Cabo waters, where both big blues and big tunas love 8 1/2" lures like this one that the striped marlin dote on too. No prob on the little guys that hit it either...that big hook will even nail little, five pound yellowfin.

The next shot leaves a lot to be desired quality-wise and I will post a better picture later. But it shows how we rig the C-hook, swaged with very tough plastic chafe gear and swinging up and down freely and run scorpion style with the swage pulled into the soft/hard head. After a fish is hooked, the swage pops out, the lure slides up the leader and the fish can't use its weight to try to shake the hook. Of course, they just can't shake a circle anyway.

There ya go.

[Captain Fred Archer]

Just for the record, I do not buy into the light strike drag thing on lures with C-hooks. I have already explained why earlier - "Slow as molassis versus fast as lightning".

Might also be a function of the big hooks that I use, but still, all of the physical dynamics of a bite happen far, far faster on a lure bite than a bait one.

[Squidnation]

Originally Posted by Captain Fred Archer

Footin'

I am the weirdest duck on the pond in most things and that is true with the C hooks that I use in lures. They are commercial longliner ones, non-offset and with the barbs removed. I also use much bigger hooks than most others. I can't tell you what sizes they are because I don't remember and besides, size numbers aren't standardized yet.

When it comes to running circles on lures with bait, I don't do much of that, other than the strip baits, Spanish and ballyhoo that I run on what I call "HooHats" and under ProSquid pitch baits. Here too, I run much bigger hooks than most. The strip baits are easy and I just use the very same hooks that I use in the all-artificial lures with them.

If I'm feeling lazy I run J's in the 'hoos and Spaniards. It is too much to get into here, but if I'm serious about using the C hook in a bait on a lure I have a way of bridling it that works well, but takes time to rig.

Here's a look at a CaboTiger rigged for Cabo waters, where both big blues and big tunas love 8 1/2" lures like this one that the striped marlin dote on too. No prob on the little guys that hit it either...that big hook will even nail little, five pound yellowfin.

The next shot leaves a lot to be desired quality-wise and I will post a better picture later. But it shows how we rig the C-hook, swaged with very tough plastic chafe gear and swinging up and down freely and run scorpion style with the swage pulled into the soft/hard head. After a fish is hooked, the swage pops out, the lure slides up the leader and the fish can't use its weight to try to shake the hook. Of course, they just can't shake a circle anyway.

There ya go.

Fred was your hook up ration better on circle with aritficials or j's with artificials? You are one of the few that I know that used circles on artificials. Very interesting stuff

thanks again

[Sterling]

Fred, I need that Evelyn Wood speed reading class, is she still around?

The measured pitch bait seems like a good idea, especially with an inexperienced crew. It seems keeping the measured line together, so it's not in the way and doesn't tangle on your pitch, could be a challenge.

The end result is that straggler, which generally resembles a spreader bar with a hook bait on it. So here's my next question, which I am sure some purists will scoff at. Why not keep your pitch bait in the water, swimming several feet behind the teaser? It would have a good chance of getting bit straight out, and if the fish comes onto the teaser you can swim it up and it's right there.

[Bert Rodgers]

[quote=Squidnation;323864]

As far as skirted hoos with a sea witch or something. I would rig them the same in this video and pull the hook in front of the seawitch.

QUOTE]

Matt on the Hattitude simply cut the top off of an octipus skirt so the the whole was large enough to slide over the swivel of his guac/style rig. His rig placed the swivels where the pin would be in a pin rig instead of between the eyes.

The skirted bait swam well but it did tend to come out of the water a little more than the nakeds. On a calm day I think that may be a good thing. How many times have you seen a skipped bait with a pink skirt get hot? I have.

Bert