Guac questions...

[WAHOONBOX]

THERE IS A BIG DIFFERENCE IN WHIFFING & SUCKING.......

[Deep C]

Box I blew it. I'm friggin useless with the circle... I do good with em deep. The deeper the better even but on top I SUCK! I sting sails in my sleep for crying out loud. I whiff one now and then by not seeing them but this one came up stuck his tounge oyut and mooned me. It swallowed way way long and the hook did not find meat.
I was hoping that perhaps in your divine Boxness could analyze where I am pokin the pooch, droppin the ball, screwin up?

I'm gonna go on a limb and ask a question beacuse I do not know the answer to it. Being that the bait is hook is run through a swivel would that allow it to turn upside down and block itself from bowing up with the leader?

[Squid]

Instead of using circle hooks on the ol' Guac. rig, this year I went to using 6/0 live bait hooks. Many companies make them---Mustad, Eagle Claw, Owner, etc. The ones I have been using are the black finish Mustad's (if I had the number for the hooks I have been using, I'd post it----I'm in the not so great state of Kansas at the moment instead of NC.) and have had FAR better success with hookups. You have to step up the size of the swivel the slightest bit to get them to fit over the barb since you can't squash the barb (I guess you can squash it, but I haven't) but so far I have had no troubles. These live bait hooks may be a little tough to find but with a little looking, you shouldn't have any trouble. With the live bait hooks, you can leave your drags at strike and give him the heat when he bites instead of super light as you do with the circles. I've even caught more mahi's than I've missed this year off this rig using these hooks. Didn't know if any of you guys have tried this or not but it sure has worked well for me this year! Tight lines and cold beers!

[Deep C]

Oh I have ten zillion styles of LB hook and not a question that I can drill fish with em... Trying to learn the circle game as a lot of tourneys are heading that direction...
Trying to come up with a circle rig that I can sting consistently with thats quick ,,,

[FASTWATER]

Deep here is a trick I learned in mexico a few years back for guac's that is awesomes especially for sails! #1 make a loop about four inches long i use a figure eight knot,this way you can change your hook size and weight as needed the 7% gami siwash is my standard hook personnelly.#2 thread the hook thru the eye of the hook slide it over the shank and pull tight.#3 put your hook in position of bait back to your cut you can then sew your bait up and go thru the loop you have made also as you darn your bait up we usually run about 6 foot leaders,sliding our egg sinkers down on top of the bait add a skirt and hold on!!! last few years I been averaging at least a 80% hookup ratio as their is no way they can steal a bait with out getting at least a sting, I will definitely show you this winter when we come down! #4 fresh bait is almost a must for the Guac rigs I have noticed otherwise they fall apart fast from what I have experienced!!!PEACE

[FASTWATER]

I forgot to mention when we do use circles and I like the gami's for this also one of the things we do is bend the shaft out so the barb is not in line with the shank it also seems to twist into the jaw better this way ,9% is what we usually use!!!PEACE

[Deep C]

That would worj too but the wording they use in the new rules is "Non-offset" circle...

[FASTWATER]

That sucks, don't know what to tell yaa brudda I know on the circles after the drop back we usually never set the hook just engage drag drop the rod down to the side with tips of the rods almost in the water and reel like hell when we feel weight we lift the rods up high which turns the hook!!!PEACE

[Captain Fred Archer]

Myself and others have been fishing circle hooks in live and dead baits, pitched or trolled and in lures for well over a decade now. The hook up ratio on my boats went up significantly, both on crew hooked and customer hooked fish. It skyrocketed for the latter and my 'pit bosses who formerly hated it when customers insisted on hooking their own bait fish because they screwed so many up on the J's grew to actually encouraging them to do the hooking because beginners who followed instructions and coaching while the bite was happening rarely missed a fish and they never gut hooked them.

I have personally fished circle hooks on all of my SuperBars for that same period and have enjoyed super hookup and landing ratios - at least as good as J's and probably even better. I went to circle hooks in all cases, but starting with the bars because they do so little damage to the fish and, at least the way we did it with the barbs removed, were so easy to release fish off of. We operated under strict limits in Mexico and even though many of the local boats regularly exceeded them, we did not. When it came to our most common meat fish, tuna and dorado, that limit was five of each per boat, not per angler.

Unless you experienced it, it is hard to imagine how many of those fish (and striped marlin) we caught on an average day, but I'm sure that most of you who have done a lot of tuna fishing know that it is no big deal to get covered on a full spread by the tunas. That was eight fish for us, so if we did get covered early on, we had three fish to release, right from the get-go. (And they don't come off of circle hooks.) And even if they were nice ones, we encouraged those who wanted the meat (many didn't, since they are on vacation far from home. This meant we released them all in those cases, because sport caught fish cannot be sold in Mexico) to only box four fish, leaving room for one of those Cabo 2-300 pounders that weren't uncommon. So the boys were releasing four tuna on a first stop like that.

I have never seen the sense in releasing injured fish that are likely to die, so the fact that the vast majority of the tunas we caught were looped around the jaw (you don't really hook fish on C's, you loop hooks around jaw hinges), and there were no barbs on the hooks, with a little practice it got quite easy to short wrap a tuna, run a plier with a hole between the jaws (regular plier I guess you'd call it), slide it over the hook, then push hard, twist and slack off on the leader at the same time and the fish was gone and in great shape. (We heavily masking taped our plier handles to make them easy to grip when they got wet and of course had them on wrist lanyards.)

This worked well on both big and little tunas, but more so with the little guys. Sometimes we had to lift a runt out of the water and use his weight to help us twist the hook out. Big ones were actually easier and we released a lot of them. If they were the real horses, we encouraged our customers to only box one and release the rest and most of the time they went along with it.

Those who fish bars a lot and catch a lot of tuna on them have probably experienced a pretty common phenomenon that happens with the big tunas. Many times these fish charge straight up the main leader and gobble down several other squids on up the main leader and not just the last, armed one. A lot of these fish get gill or throat hooked if you are using J's and although this isn't a problem if you are boxing all of the ones you catch, it's not a good thing if you are releasing them or most of them.

Doesn't happen with the circles. They rarely stick a fish when he turns off the bar and the drag pressure starts pulling the squids out of their throats, especially if the circle hook is non-offset (the best for hookup ratio) and dull - which a circle hook should be. We did hook a very small number of fish around gill arches, but this didn't appear to do any great visible damage to most of them. We kept a few that were bleeders.

I catch a large number of striped marlin, dorado and wahoo on SuperBars. They are my best all-around fish catchers, period. A pair of swimming ballyhoos with hats and circle hooks off the long riggers are my number two best fish catchers.

"Marlin lures" only find their way into my spreads when the blue ones and the blacks are around. I did run them a lot when I spent a couple of years coming up with a way of significantly raising hookup and landing ratios on hard lures with single J hooks in them. Once I accomplished that I went back to my favored "BB" spreads - bars and ballyhoos.

I too am a "marlin lure" maker - a long way from being one of the biggest. Mine are called FatBoys. And I think that they are as good as any other "marlin lure" out there, or even better. But I still don't troll them except when the big girls are around because the BB's simply produce the best catches for me and that's what charter fishing is all about.

However, when I first started experimenting with circle hooks, I ran them in every kind of lure - from bars to FatBoys. Reading what is being written here takes me back to that time and the fish that I figured would be just about impossible to hook on a C - dorado. I don't recall why I thought that, but I did. So naturally, the first fish I caught on a FatBoy was a dorado! Not only that, but the first guy to catch a fish on a lure with a circle hook in it up in California was none other than the UpRigger Man, captain Bob Melville on his Bert charterboat, RNR. It too was a dorado! Nowadays when I see a dorado coming at a "marlin lure" with a circle in it I know we're gonna get his arse. How they get that circle, I dunno, but they do!

We don't have Whitey out west, but small striped marlin do a great immitation of them and we do have sailfish and they are the hard ones to hook out here. But here too, circle hooks make a big difference. A very well known and top Cabo charter captain, TJ Dobson ("Checkmate" Bobby's brother) had this to say about a sail on a bar with a circle hook, "When you see one coming, don't say or do anything to alert the guys in the 'pit. You don't want them pitching a bait on them because they miss too many. Just turn your back and don't even think about that fish until the drag starts sounding off. That circle doesn't stick or spook them (marlin either) and they stay after it until they get it."

I risk the wrath of many when I say that us being required to use circle hooks for marlin or even other fish down the road, and not taking a political position (although as some here know, no one hates being told what to do by anyone any more than I do), if it does happen, it isn't going to be so bad. In fact, I'll predict right here and now that some of us will be like me and Bob and my boys and like the circles better.

I am not going to get into the various forms of rigging circle hooks for lures here, other than to say that it is important that the hook can swing in spreaderbars and "marlin lures". I have one 'Pit Boss who likes the loop and one who likes to snell hooks in baits, both bridled and I really don't see a difference in their results.

I have always suspected that one day we'd have circle hooks shoved down our throats, especially considering how "fish kind" they are and the fact that, in my opinion at least and based on the only scientific research that has been done, our fish stocks are being drastically depleted by rampant industrial fishing world-wide and sooner or later we were going to have to take steps to minimize the sport kill, whether that was fair or not. My guess and actually hope was that instead of outright bans on fishing for certain species that this would include C hooks and reduced limits and now it is happening. I can't do anything about this, but I sure have put my time in on the circles and am passing some of what I learned on here in the hope that it will give some of you without that amount of experience some solid hope for the future.

I know that this sort of input is both resented and poo-poo'd by some, especially if it comes from a dreaded outdoor writer or author, but that's okay, I'm used to that sort of thing and I do know that some will appreciate the knowledge. They are the most important ones.