What is your WAHOO spread?

[Captain Fred Archer]

Because of my "wahoo fixation" and where I did a lot of fishing for many years, I have been a "wirehead" of the first order. I ran just about everything on it, including my pitch baits, because even though we might be pitching to a marlin, a wahoo could come in and do a snip job in a heartbeat, so my pitchers all had short, 12" wire leaders. I HATE getting bit off and once actually brought a new guy trying for a crew job back to Cabo and deposited him at the dock and went back out because the SOB pitched live baits at marlin without the wire during a hot wahoo bite and got bit off twice in a row! I HATE losing wahoo, even though on high count days, we released plenty of them.

Along the way I had to deal with wire's only major shortcoming that I know of, kinking and breaking. After going down the learning curve, kinking and breaking only happened on my boat if some customer leadered a fish, because my boys knew how to handle wire and we had gotten to the kind of rigging that virtually eliminated the problem.

Over the years I finally realized a couple of key things that I wish someone had told me about long before. First, came wind-on leaders, which I started fishing with long, long ago when I market fished GBFT and finally got around to downsizing and using on my sportfishing tackle about twenty years ago. I started writing about wind-ons back then, too. Almost no sport fishermen were using them back then and there was no internet, so passing the info about wind-ons took a lot of time.

To this day I pride myself on writing about things in my books that I do not write about in magazine articles or on the Internet that are, at the time, true leading edge stuff that will eventually become known, but quite possibly not for a very long time as far as the general fishing public is concerned. I figure that's the least that I can do for those who do me the honor of reading my books and so I strive to make sure that that kind of information is in them. And besides, those who are willing to and want to read books to learn are generally pretty sharp fishermen, or soon-to-be-ones, who are interested in where it is going, moreso than where it has been. They can learn that last one just about anywhere and they know it.

Not long after I started using wind-ons, I started shortening up on my leaders, all of them, not just the wahoo ones. I had learned the hard way about wire leaders that were long enough to allow a lure to slide up the leader and then trail behind a running wahoo, as in "Snip!", usually right where the mono and wire were joined. See ya, wahoo lure! That ended fast and since making the wire on my lures only about three feet long, I have never had a wahoo do that again - not a one!

There is no sense getting into a lot of detail on the other fish and wire, except to say that I am convinced that it has zero negative effect on them and as long as the mono portion of the wind-on is the appropriate size, there are no leader wear negatives or anything like that.

Which leaves us with how to avoid ever kinking and breaking a leader again, unless of course you want or need to, a skill that is important for leadermen to get down pat, just in case and especially when it comes to really big fish. I'll be the first to say that fish pitched into a box with the leader detached from the main line can and do twist the hell out of wire sometimes and these need to be trashed, but it just doesn't happen during the fight, at least not to me.

The secret to not kinking and breaking wire is below. Also one of my wahoo drawings, just for the hell of it...man, I love those things! Followed by a 'hoo out of the box with what he did to the wire while he was in there. There are no kinks in the wire, so my boys would have straightened it when I wasn't looking. Me, I'd trash it and go with a new one, but I have to say, we never broke one of those curly ones and of course, if there was a kink, the guys dumped the leader. My crew hated losing wahoo too and they hated how I behaved if that happened too, as in "Loco Capitan Diablo!"

One last comment. The biggest (maybe...that other, unweighed one was a monster too - not an IGFA legal catch, mate touched the rod and there wasn't a scale, let alone an IGFA certified one around anyway) of the two huge wahoo I posted earlier is real. I know that it looks like it was P-shopped in, but it isn't. That's the new, 184# world record fish caught right off of Cabo. And there are other, bigger ones, but I ain't saying how I know - it hurts too much to talk about!

Mexico Lindo Querido

[Ace1st]

Usually run islanders with squid skirts on the flat lines behind torpedo weights, always a SeaStar red/blak-blak/purle with skirted and double hooks on the planer rod. Started fishing WAHOOKINGS lures recently and must say they get eat up, I rig mine with a Ballyhoo on the outrigger, its easy to find in the spread and shows lots of flash. Bluewater Candy Jag on the other rigger red and Black with a Ballyhoo trailer. All rigged on piano wire #10. My hot colors seem to be blu/whit, red/blk, pink/whit, pur/blk and anyhting dark. Sometimes I drop a Marauder in the flat if things are slow, the vibration seems to pull them up sometimes.

[sportfishingusa]

WAHOO!!!!!! IN MY SPREAD!!! HEHEHEH



But i must admit like everyone else i love DARK colors! and i love the torpedo weights.. never really used a planer i need someone to teach me!!

But also love the braid marauders!! THEY ARE AWESOME!! Believe it or not i troll them underneath a nice SQUIDNATION SQUID BAR!! WAHOO SEEM TO HIT THE MARAUDERS AND COME RIGHT UP THRU THE BAR!!! YEEE HAW!!

[Glenn W]

Well Fred, no doubt in my mind you've twisted a wire or 3 zillion. I gotta disagree with you on the kinking wire though. I will admit, if you only have a 3' leader, your chances of kinking it are slim to none.
Down here in North Carolina we play with wire a little bit too, and even used it a fair amount in days past (that's all we ever used). Only difference is we like them long leaders--- 20- 22'. Between, the Mahi's, Wahoo's, Yellowfin, and Blue Marlin they all come to wire. I ain't saying it has never happened, but these 20' + wire leaders haven't kinked enough to remember. Of course, one has to have a little sense about them in wiring real wire, by taking your wraps accordingly.
Each to their own, and we've had this discussion before, but I'll take a long wire leader over a 3' section anyday simply for the presentation and stealth from the lack of a swivel right in front of the bait. It may not make a difference, but then again, maybe NC tried and true techniques ain't wrong either.

[SERprise]

Sometimes when I don't have any wire I just use 400# mono and I haven't lost a fish yet. Only problem is you usually have to change the leader after each fish.

[Captain Fred Archer]

Glenn,

I am in no way knocking how NC fishermen fish. I fact, I have noted many times that your area was the last one that I know of where mono leaders finally made their way onto the scene with at least a few fishermen. Is that bad or a knock of some kind? I don't think so and the reason I pointed that out to a lot of fishermen over the years was to show that, at least as far as some awfully talented fishermen were concerned, wire works and works well and that it wasn't just me who thought that it wasn't a detriment to catching fish. Positive commentary, in other words.

But the fishing world that we live in today has one big bunch of fishermen who have never used wire at all and those are the ones that I am mostly concerned about. An old timer who has used wire forever, no matter where he fishes, isn't going to learn a thing about wire from me, but the wire newbie can have a lot of questions and more than a few doubts about it. Plus, they often get bad input about wire from people who don't know a damned thing about actually using it and who almost universlly have negative things to say about it. This is what in my books I call "people trying to learn something from people who know nothing, but say they do." Sounds funny, but it's all too common, especially on the Internet.

I also try to help people who are going to other venues around the world, ones where wire is totally unfamiliar to local panga and charter cruiser crews who bring valuable lures, like Ace's or my WahooBars or MarlinBars, Islanders, Marauders, you name it with them that have wire leaders on them. Here, the locals seem to have grabbing leader and twisting it around every which way, including the typical grabbing it and twisting the hell out of it while hanging a fish in the air alongside and bopping the crap out of it with a priest, or billy club down pat. Those guys can kink and pop wire faster than a Barrier Reef pro wireman can when he gets into trouble with a big black one and has to break his way out of the metal or die. It's mighty tough to teach those longtime mono leader handlers how to manage wire, but it's easy and makes sense to them if you know enough to make the shorty wire ones and tell them, "no manos sur la empate metal, amigo...nunca! Solamente la nylon", "don't touch the wire, amigo...never! Only the mono."

I also try to help out the weekend warriors, who might not fish enough, or have regular, talented crew aboard the short wire trick because it is a lot easier to tell those folks, "Don't ever touch that wire or I will kill you and dump your body out here", instead of trying to teach them the right ways of handling long, wire leaders. Plus, the shorties go great with the windon leaders that I also preach about and that are great for pro or weekender alike, as long as they make them right, or buy them from Basil, The Windon King.

As far as a swivel three feet in front of a lure scaring a troll fish is concerned, sorry, but I don't even come close to buying into that one. Of course, you go ahead and worry about it if you like. But as far as I'm concerned, hell, fish don't even remotely approach the intellectual capacity of a tadpole, let alone a hoppity toad. They have no way of knowing that a swivel represents danger somehow, or even coming remotely close to what it might be and then treat it like a tripwire on a path with great fear, like I did back when I was a young fellow. That would involve rational thought and deductive reasoning and maybe even a degree from FU (Fish University) and those things are as scarce nuts on a grapefruit when it comes to fish.

I can't imagine fish taking a swivel three feet in front of a lure to be anything other than what they do see all of the days of their lives - a small sea creature of some kind trying to get out of the way of, or fleeing from the oncoming, bigger "fish" that the lure obviously represents to them. I have sat in my tuna tower and watched thousands of fish of all kinds come into my patterns and have never seen one swim past the lure or lean over and peer past it to see if there might be a dangerous old swivel running in front of it and abandoning its kill run. If anything, IMHO, that swivel increases the appeal and excitement of a lure by the very act of it being something small, appearing to be running ahead of the lure; in effect, becoming a teaser. And Lordy, Lordy, I DO believe in teasers! Heck, I even run them in front of my high speed trolling lures and have proven to myself and others that they make a huge difference in the number of bites you get.

Rather than re-write what I have already written and knowing that the last thing on earth that some here would be caught doing is reading one of my books, here's an excerpt from the new book Secrets of the Wahoo Trolling Pros"on this very subject...

In-line Teasers for High Speed Wahoo? You betcha!

The importance and effectiveness of these little “bite-inciters” for wahoo was brought home to me as clearly as possible during a Cabo wahoo hunt not long ago. I’ll spare you the gory details, except to say that I spent a morning fast trolling the ‘hoos along one of my favorite areas of reefs, points and rock piles. I ran five identical blue and white lures that we were testing. Only two out of the five had teasers running in front of them and the other three were rigged without them.
I ran one each on the short and long flats, two on outriggers and one shotgun long and down the middle. I moved the lures one hole to the left every half an hour, so each one had equal time in each position.
We had nine bites in the three off-tide hours that we fished and my crankers managed to land five of them. We missed two bites (one because a hook point had been busted off and somebody was careless enough to put it back out – scratch one new deckhand), one was a technically caught fish that I am not counting that my deckhand had the leader in hand on when a huge bull sea lion shot out from under the boat, grabbed it and broke the leader. The others were lost because of angler mistakes by my amateur crankers.

IRREFUTABLE PROOF IN MY BOOK (AS USUAL, PUN INTENDED)

Every single one of those bites and caught fish came on the lures that we were testing with the teasers on them! (Back live for a sec. No, I am not going to name the lure or teaser here. The point is an important one to pass on, I reserve the specific lure and teaser type for my readers.)
That’s right, nine consecutive bites on the two lures with the teasers and zero on the very same lures without them! I was shocked because, even though I believe strongly in teasers, I never would have guessed (and hadn't up until that day) that they could be that important in of all things, high speed trolling.
All of the lures had the same leaders, same hooks, same trolling rigs, everything exactly the same except for the teasers. I don’t know what the gentle reader would call that, but I know what I would and did – “Irrefutable proof”! Coincidence couldn’t possibly have entered into the equation. In fact, if the test was skewed in any way, it was in favor of the plain lures, since I had 50% more of them out there competing with the ones with teasers on them.

AND THAT CONFIRMED SOMETHING ELSE FOR ME

That explanation had to do with wahoo’s affinity for spreader bars. I consider my Generation II WahooBars to be the most effective lures of all for wahoo and they catch all of the species that I fish for too. It's ironic that the right kind of bars are such awesome wahoo slayers, seemingly unlikely candidates for lures that are (so wrongly) thought of as tuna catchers by many.

FISHERMEN WITH HEADS IN THE SAND PULL THEM OUT SOONER OR LATER

Sadly, but all too predictably, a huge number of fishermen are behind the eight ball when it comes to realizing that bars do indeed catch everything that swims and that they may well be the best artificial lures of all. It literally takes this particular group about a decade to finally realize things like this and many times a particular part of the country will shun them completely until, sooner or later, a few folks try them and word gets out and the next thing you know everybody and his brother is using them. The Pacific Northwest was a prime example of this. Two years ago, "Spreader Bars" were dirty words up there when it came to their great albacore fishing. Last year all hell broke loose, two of the three tuna tournaments up there were won on them and we had a hard time keeping up with the demand. This year the fever has spread down the coast and into California waters. You watch, Florida will be next.

There is a chapter on these awesome fish-catchers later in the book, but for now all that I am pointing out is that I have seen the example that happened above on lures with teasers and ones without them happen over and over again when the bars are in the water; and that is a bunch of times, because I am never without bars in my pattern – NEVER!

COMPETITION; IT'S AN AWESOME, INCREDIBLE FORCE AT SEA

I guess – no I know that scene of a little predator fish chasing and just about catching that one little teaser is an overpowering stimulant. It causes neutral game fish of all kinds to simply freak out and their natural, competitive natures and unrelenting prey drives sweep over them and take control of their very bodies like some kind of insane drug. And they attack when they shouldn’t and wouldn’t under any other circumstances.

SPREADERBARS? OH MERCY! SAME EXACT THING, IN SPADES!

It is the same with the spreaderbars, only as it says above, in spades. That scene of a whole school of bait fish in a natural panic configuration, instead of one single one running madly away from a pursuing small predator that is about to overtake them is just too much for the genetic and instinctive forces that control the stone stupid creatures that we call “fish”. Many times those forces take over in an instant and that relentlessly and hopelessly dooms a great number of them to react instantly and with great vigor and determination and dire consequences. Happily, that happens many times when the fish aren't feeding, and that puts more fish in the box on many days. We’ll discuss these awesome fishing weapons a bit later.

I CAN BE A REAL DUMMY...BUT I DO LEARN

I don’t have to admit this, but if for no other reason than to show that I have made more mistakes than just about anyone, I have to. Up until the day of that test down in Cabo, I had never run teasers in front of high speed trolling lures. Why, I don’t know, but I can assure you that once that day was over, I spent a week trying to kick myself in what I must have been thinking with instead of my brain for a very long time. The thought of how many wahoo bites I had NOT gotten over the years because I had been trolling plain old high speed lures just haunted me.
The only good thing about all of that is that I will never, ever run that type of lure without a teaser in front of it again. And like all of the lessons that I have learned the boneheaded, hard way - once learned; it will stay with me for good. Give it a try. I think you'll be very pleased and maybe like me, shocked at the results.

END OF EXCERPT

That fit right into the discussion and I don't like making statements and claims without letting folks know the experience or experiences they are based on. Follow the advice if you want, ignore it if you want too. I'm just trying to help here and am giving some of my "product" away.

[Glenn W]

Points well taken regarding experience with wire and no doubt a very short leader being less apt to kink. Perhaps wire is combersome to some anglers like spreader bars are to me--- The few times I have used the things it's looked like a monkey in a spagettii fight in the cockpit.
As far as the longer leaders go, I don't think the leaders spook Wahoo to any great exent-- in fact, my planer bait leaders are only about 4' long as well. Its the top baits with the longer leaders and for most part, the swivel is out of the water. Our theory is that this eliminates the bubbles created from the swivel connection and also helps prevents attacks on the swivel by the dang Kings and False Albacores--- as well as Wahoo's to some extent. As far as Tunas are concerned there is no doubt in my mind that this longer leader theory allows for more bites when fishing small, dead baits. More of a finese presentaition if you will.--- Of course if your pulling the toy box, I recon a little ole swivel doesn't make much difference I don't think it really makes too much of a difference at all in Billfish bites, but that ole 18' of #19 wire is necessary with a Big, long fish (obviously one can use a shock leader out of mono in place of this, but I'm referring to pure Blue Marlin fishing in this instance). As far as Blue Marlin are concerned I don't personally know anyone that still uses big ole wire, but there there are still a few very good Capts that do because of they feel there is a much better presentation with a big ole Spanish as a bait (rather than using heavy mono).
Good luck with your Wahoo dredges--- hell, I'm thinking of giving it a try this fall on a day when the Wahoos have lock jaw and won't touch any of my mess.

[Captain Fred Archer]

Holy cow! You and me communicating peacefully? This might surprise you, but I think that's great...great enough that it's almost 5 a.m., I've been working all night, am exhausted, but just had to answer. You're a good street fighter, Glenn, but you're an even better fisherman, the kind that I actually really like to yak and compare notes with and I know it. So good, good, good.

Roger on all of the wire stuff. Now here's a little info for you. Back in the old days of long leaders, both mono and wire (remember, I'm older than dirt and have been big game fishing for (gulp!) 53 years), I used to get bit off at the swivel by the razor gang too, the fat alberts were just a pain, but the kings and wahoos were friggin' disasters as far as I was concerned. Then came the shorty leaders. Now, I didn't plan it this way and had no way of knowing it would happen, but all of a sudden, the swivel bites stopped - completely! As I learned with in-line teasers and have noted here in the past, this has something to do with when the swivel, or a real teaser, is run close to the lure, the two of them seem to become one scene to the fish and they take the chasing lure every single friggin' time! I not only never got bit off (and this is all surface stuff) ever again by a wahoo, we have super-sized unreal toothy macks down here that get up the 18 pounds and attack in wild packs that never go for a spreaderbar or an in-line teaser - never!

We don't have kings and I thank God for that, 'cause those things, especially the smaller ones, seem to have rules of their own when it comes to any kind of multiple lure. I DO NOT like those puppies! But we have enough toothy critters down in Cabo, from the 'hoos, to those sierra macks, to Pacific bonito, to snappers and groupers and such, that I know that they just don't get in front of a lure to get at a teaser or swivel as long as it isn't fished too far in front of the lure.

Roddy Hays has a theory about that and he is one helluva smart fisherman and I'd quote it here, but the short version is what I said, which is all that counts anyway, gamefish don't go after teasers that are fished close to lures, period. I have some Moldcraft Little Birds that I have run in front of lures and baits for probably fifteen years now that have never been touched by a toothy one. But I know what happens if you do like a lot of fishermen do and fish it way out in front of the lure...naturally, it becomes a lure on its own and so does the real lure and as a result, the birds get bit and bit off at times.

I loved that "monkey in a spaghetti fight in the cockpit" quote! I love monkey stuff and it is so true, too. But this is no sales pitch because I'm giving you some of my stuff. All you have to do is promise me that you will give them a good try. Your experiences were based on an entirely, completely, radically different kind of bar than a SuperBar. I created them because I couldn't stand the tangles and the hard pulling and bending and kinking and breaking and rusting and corroding of other bars. There is no other like it, and until you have seen and run them you would never believe how far, far different and superior they are than what you have tried and been so frustrated over before. That's right, I've said it and am willing to have you see the truth for yourself and say what you will about the results.

Deal? If so, please contact me at my personal email fredarcher@cox.net with your address and hang onto your jock, mister!

Gotta sleep. And dream of old Glenn going, "Holy shit, look at those things run! Dang, they look g......kafriggin'whammo! Another hook up? Holy cow, they work! Everybody's too tired of catching fish on bars? Send that monkey out here that Archer sent to help with the crankin' when this happens. You know, that big, ugly, Junkyard Monkey with the big muscles? Huh? That's Archer in a monkey suit? Well I'll be danged! I told you, that guy just never stops promoting! He's WHAT? Well, get that football away from him and get him out here to crank on this fish!"

Goodnight all!

[WahooKing]

Originally Posted by Wound Up James

My kinda guy...

[Ace1st]

WOUND UP JAMES!!!!!!!!!!!.omg: Thats just sick right there!!!