Favorite Teaser Marlin Fishing

[#1Gaffman]

Horse ballyhoo chain with a pink island pro/horse bally combo on the back of it.

I go ahead and teach you all this stuff and then you blurt it out on the the internet..... No more info for you...

[whitey]

I go ahead and teach you all this stuff and then you blurt it out on the the internet..... No more info for you...

We have been using ballyhoo chains with islanders behind them long before the best part of you dripped down your mothers leg and ended up as a stain on the back seat of the car.

[#1Gaffman]

We have been using ballyhoo chains with islanders behind them long before the best part of you dripped down your mothers leg and ended up as a stain on the back seat of the car.

you can keep that foul language trash talk for your newly found best bud, Deepy c

[Anders]

using six fred archer spreader bars making you pull 90 baits behind the boat plus two dinks on the long riggers and two on and two pink squid daisy chains on the riggers with two dinks from the shotgun totaling over a 100 baits

[#1Gaffman]

using six fred archer spreader bars making you pull 90 baits behind the boat plus two dinks on the long riggers and two on and two pink squid daisy chains on the riggers with two dinks from the shotgun totaling over a 100 baits

Good luck dropping back through that landmine field

I like my good old green squid chains. Or a big old plug of some sort.

[calebw]

With the saildogs and the whites do you prefer the small 6 inch squids or the 9 inch squids.

[Bert Rodgers]

With the saildogs and the whites do you prefer the small 6 inch squids or the 9 inch squids.

I like the 9" and 12". But they will chase any of them.

Bert

[Captain Fred Archer]

There is no doubt that my favorite teasers, whether I'm doing my favorite and most productive technique of them all (for me), bait and switch fishing, or something that I rarely do, mixing teasers in with other lures, Anders is braver than I am and #1 Gaffman is right, dropping back into a full spread of teasers of any kind, bars or otherwise, requires a lot more luck than I have!

And my favorite way of switching from a bait and switch spread to one of mixed lures and teasers is to run my regular, mixed species Baja spread of six armed (with hooks) SuperBars with different color or size chasebaits on them that match what the fish are feeding on. Everything is monochromatic - the same colors and sizes - because I believe that kind of spread is much more natural looking than one with a wide variety of different size, type, and color lures...bait doesn't travel like that - it travels in like-sized and same-colored groups. I feel that the more of them that I can pack into my wake, the more likely I am to raise schools of pelagics, including marlin, especially whitey's cousin, the striper and sails too.

The only things different in my typical spread are the two ballyhoo rigged to swim on HooHats that I run off of my long riggers. There are a lot of very good reasons for that, but this is neither the time nor the place to get into that and besides, it's all covered in the books. Let's just leave it that we pick up a lot of extra fish on them that made it worth the time, money, and hassle to bring them out to California from Florida and then have friends and clients hand carry them down to us as luggage.

Before I go any further, one of the good things about our bait and switch bars is that you can convert them to regular, armed bars simply by snapping on a chasebait with a hook in it, which takes seconds. And of course you can convert it back to a teaser by simply removing the armed chasebait.

There are two schools of thought among the serious teaser guys that I know. One is to match the hatch size-wise as far as what you are fishing for is or is usually chasing and eating if you don't know what's on the menu that day (shame on you!). The other is to match common offshore bait sizes, which are often a lot smaller than the little predators that get fed on by the big guys, which are often eating the same little baits as the small predator fish.

I am usually from the school that likes to troll smaller teaser bars, like 4, 6, and 9 inch. That's because those sizes attract all kinds of different sizes and species to the spread, and because one of the huge features of bait and switch fishing is the complete and absolute control over what fish you bait and what ones you don't, we can ignore the smaller fish that come up and go berserko trying to spook individual baits that they can then target and eat out of the teaser pods, but can't, and that in turn, attract the attention of bigger predator fish that we can and do bait when they show up. And, if we're getting harrassed by bunches of little dorados and tunas that we don't want to catch and the inevitable happens and a big bull or nice yellowfin or bigeye shows up, of course, we bait and catch him. This is all good stuff that I think many fishermen miss out on and that costs them plenty of fish...and even tournaments.

The Toad teaser that I love and won't fish without isn't in the following illustration, but it is always there, running down the middle and in front of the teaser bars when I am fishing anywhere, for anything, from marlin to the meat fish.

I may include the other lure that I really like to troll when bait and switch fishing or running my standard spread of armed bars - The Spider. Short and sweet, it is not only an excellent, lightweight, light pulling dredge, it doubles as a wonderful surface bar that we call "The Ruckus Raiser" and a new version, "The JT (Josh Temple) Special" is about to make its debut. A dredge that doubles as a great spreader that costs far, far less than the typical dredge? You betcha! Perfect for both big and small boats too.

Here's a teaser bar spread from the marlin book. It's killer and a blast to fish with and two guys can fish it easily and efficiently, too.

[JonnyD]

Dredges and squid chains. Simple and effective.