Someone teach me about Ballys

[fmoore]

Well, we left from Salisbury today around 4:30 with a 2 hour drive and wanted to get home before dark . I said to my dad stop at Rt 110 B&T. We get near and I say stop he just keeps driving I yell stop damnit I need my hoos and he goes bullshit I am not unloading half our garage in the dark. So no hoos. But it ssounds like I'm better off anyway. Gonna end up ordering them from Baitmasters soon. I can't wait any longer.

[Captain Fred Archer]

I have shown you folks what our 'HooHats look like and how they are constructed with a removable and adjustable counterbalance, or in this case, different kind of chin weight - very different, in fact.

The photo below shows the head design again. I don't put chin weights on the ballyhoo or Spaniards that I rig on a 'HooHat. I rig them nice and neat and straight (I do that okay, but Da Box is Da King 'a that sorta T'ing) and use that removable and adjustable counterbalance/chin weight to do a lot more than I can with a conventional chinner.

First, I can remove the counter/chinner altogether and make a popping, smoking surface ballyhoo and Hat combo. This is great on calm days. I can trim the counter/chinner to make for a lighter one, but I like to keep it as is because it makes for a great swimmer and is good to have on rough days.

We have designed the heads so that fishermen can fine tune the heck out of the counter/chinner simply by inserting 1/4 ounce egg sinkers that fit firmly in the cavity and that can be moved inside of it for absolutely perfect tune jobs. You can also use 1/8 ounce egg sinkers, but when you do, you have to "cap" the ends with 1/4 ouncers.

Among the things that we are getting a lot of positive comments about this fine tuning thing are ones where fishermen are telling us that they really like the fact that you can "set up" one 'HooHat for different sized baits without having to actually go to a different size head and using ballyhoo with different sized chin weights. By this they mean that one 'HooHat can be tuned for everything from a dink ballyhoo, to a horse, to a Spaniard and even a mullet or a strip bait. This really simplifies the ballhoo rigging because you aren't using chin weights, just rigging up the baits and putting them in the chiller.

Let's say you're running dinks up top with no weight and the wind comes up and starts to push your bait around. Instead of replacing the bait with one with a chin weight, you just shove an egg sinker into the Hat and see how it runs. Need a little more weight? Just reel her in, slip in another egg sinker and you probably have exactly what you want. Meanwhile, the rest of your dink baits are sitting in the cooler, ready to be fished with counter/chinners, without them, or whatever is called for when they are used, even if the wind drops down again, or cranks up another ten knots and you need some more "chin" to handle it. Nice, eh?

Or let's say you are running dinks, but the bite switches over to standards. Here too, your standards are all rigged and ready to rock, no matter what size counter/chinner you need for it to run sweet. You just use the very same Hat that you were running the dinks on, (usually) add another 1/4 ounce or whatever it takes, and you fish. Here too, you can adjust right along with the weather conditions, right on up to using the heavy counter/chinner that comes with the lure...if you need more weight than that, go home, it's getting too rough!

Our old timer, hard headed, vastly experienced ballyhoo riggers have all told me that once you start using the 'HooHats like this, there is no way that they will ever go back to individually chin weighting their baits - no way! Of course, I came up with these puppies for my own fishing down in Cabo, so naturally, I am prejudiced, but this is the sort of thing that most fishermen can appreciate just by hearing how it works. And it sure worked like a charm down south. My crew, who I had taught how to rig ballies with chin weights, absolutely loved not having to do that anymore and they tinkered with and tuned the baits until they were swimming like champs in no time at all.

There is yet another new benefit to 'HooHats. Now I have never heard of it up north, but maybe some guys do it. My guys loved to run the Hats with the ballyhoo swimming on its side, a trick that I used to do by side-rigging chin weights to the side of the bait's head. That was actually kind of hard to get just right, but once the Hats came along, it became as simple as inserting the ballyhoo bill in the hole at the back of the lure so that the bait was positioned on its side. Bingo! Done! Not working for you? No prob, just pull the bill out and re-position it so the bait swims upright. Takes more time to tell about than do!

And then there is the final, crazy thing that I love to do with ballyhoo - running them upside down. I honestly believe that gamefish see and go after baits that run this way way better than ones that run rightside up. Gamefish weren't designed by nature to kill the healthiest of the baitfish...they were designed to kill and remove weaklings and that is what they go for. As I say in my books, "He who stands out, dies." And an upside down ballyhoo STANDS OUT!

Baitfish are light on the bottom and dark up top so that it is hard for their main enemies, the birds to see them from above and the fish can't see them from below. Even most baitfish sides are designed to keep them from being seen from those angles.

Because of this, I rig all of my personal lures upside down because I want them to stand out and "die". And it's the same for ballyhoo on Hats, only it's a lot easier than trying to do rig them upside down using the conventional chin weights. Like running them on their sides, though, it's piece of cake with 'HooHats. (For those interested, I use a regular ballyhoo with the hook in the convetional position when I do this, so again, there is no need for special rigging of the ballyhoo.)

Conventional ballyhoo rigging has been around for a long time. Heck, I've been rigging the danged things since I was a kid down in Florida, over fifty years ago (My goodness, that doesn't make me "The Ancient Fred", does it?!) and to tell you the truth, these 'HooHats are the first radical departure in using them that I have ever seen. I'm only sorry that they didn't come along a long time ago. Here are a couple more looks at these versatile heads...

Oh, before that please, nobody ask me to make Hats with that nylon hair stuff. I hate it! Gimme a nice, easy-to-keep-clean and re-rig plastic skirt any time!