ARTIFICIAL BALLYHOO vs. REAL BALLYHOO

[Hardtail Hunter]

Great thread ...
Any favorite brands of plastics?
paddle tail or straight?

[foley10]

i rig them on a spreader bar. fished very close to the boat off a center rigger. put a green machine or a jet as the chase bait. it works. the only problem is that the bar is heavy, so you really dont have a choice as far as distance fron the boat. we fish it where it looks good, which is right behind the boat. i swim two real baits next to the bar, and a lot of times all three go down.

[chumslicker27]

Great Post Capt. Lindsay... Getting myself some of those chewy hoos....

[Pete Santini]

JUST YESTERDAY WE TROLLED A RUBBER BALLYHOO ALONG WITH THE REAL THING DOWN HERE IN SAN CRISTOBAL GALAPAGOS NOT A SNIFF ON THE FAKE THE STRIPED MARLIN ATE THE REAL THING WE SAW 45 MARLIN TAILING YESTERDAY . AS FAR AS BAIT GOES MARLIN LIKE THE REAL ONES BUT I USUSALLY JUST PULL LURES THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I TRIED THE FAKE BALLYHOO I´LL GIVE ANOTHER SHOT TOMOROW PETE SANTINI

[92 feet down]

#1 - Real Ballyhoo
#2 - strip baits
#3 - Plastic Ballys

In that order. I'll cut the bellys from dolphin in the box into strip baits b4 running rubber ballys. But in the bottom of my tackle box there are a couple of rubber ballys, just in case...

[rarhomes]

I am a believer in creativity and innovation. But a rubber ballyhoo I will stay home and save my fuel money.

Capt. Rick

[tunatamer4]

This is a really good thread.
Although this is in the "BIG GAME" forum, what type of fish are you considering "BIG GAME"?

You ask most "novice" charter boat clients who want to go and fill a box what big game is and it's tuna, dolphin and wahoo. Fake bally's are fine for this when the fish are snappin. Knock your speed up a couple of knots and they chew, no washout and sometimes multiple fish on one bait. I'm with HOLWATCHAGOT, when meatfishing, bills are bycatch.

If your targetting bills, that's a different story, but even then, of course your not going to "feed" a billfish anything that isn't natural. They will crash a fake bally just as fast as they would hit any other naked artificial that rips by them. If they're gonna eat it, they're gonna eat it.

[EJR]

I would also have take the real thing any day over the rubber ones. I have fished both and real meat, rigged properly, will out fish the rubber ones, at least in my experience.

The one time i have had incredible success was in the NE canyons on a rubber ballyhoo spreader bar. In one morning bite that bar out fished any of the other 6-7 rods in an incredible way on 60-80lb yft. That one bar with either a real or rubber hook bait wouldn't last more than 1 min once it was deployed. It did not seem to make a difference what flavor the hook bait was either.

We have tried using the same bar in either black hoos or blue hoos for bft and have not had the same success if any. That being said I still keep that bar in the arsenal but I do prefer the real thing.

[Captain Fred Archer]

It is always interesting to me how some people opinionate about things, while others experiment and find real answers based on logical, solid testing. Cap Lindsay’s experiments with the fake and real ballies was a perfect example and the kind of thing that I really admire in a fisherman. We did very much the same thing a very long time ago down in Cabo with the artificial ballies that were around. They were pretty much the same ones as are around today. Let me stress here that we didn't test the ones that he is talking about that worked best for him.

In my case it was practicality, not curiosity that drove me. We were literally the only boat down there using ballyhoo at the time and the closest source for them was four thousand miles away at BaitMasters. We didn’t dare have them shipped directly in to us because between many factors concerning Mexican authorities and airline workers, most would never make it or would thaw and spoil before we got them. So, we had to have them flown to LA or San Diego, timing that with customers or friends who were coming down, then have them bring them in as luggage. Even then, we’d occasionally run across an immigration or customs guy who would try to come up with some reason why what was happening wasn’t “legal” so he could fish for a bribe. It was expensive and it was a pain in the ass.

So, I became very interested in finding a less expensive alternative – or at least just an alternative for when we ran out, or the bait got ruined when a chubasco (hurricane) wiped out my freezer. I knew many people in the industry then, so I contacted them and got piles of samples from each. They were enthused because they knew that if their stuff worked for me that I’d write about it in the mags and books. Based on the results of our tests, I am not mentioning any names here in order to “protect the innocent”. I try hard not to mention products that haven’t passed muster for us, and mention only the best of what we have used in my books and articles.

Long story short, we did the exact same kind of experiment that Cappy Lindsay did and we did it over a matter of two weeks, fishing almost every day. My regular Cabo spread was six SuperBars and two ‘hoo off the long riggers. I think the why’s and wherefores for that are on the website and I know they are in the books. For this experiment I went to just two bars (man, I hated that) and six bally baits – three naturals and three fakes. We did exactly what the good June Bug (man, she sure is a beauty, Lindsay. My kind of machine!) cappy did. We alternated holes & poles every half hour and kept detailed records of what all happened. My crew got tired of all of the moving and was ready to mutiny at the end.

Again, short and sweet, we learned that the naturals were far superior in many ways. Unlike others, we didn’t keep any of the fakes around for the times that we ran out of “real”. I gave them away to other captains (snicker!) Not long after this experiment we discovered that a certain hollow squid was just as effective, and in ways even more effective than the real ones (“blasphemy”, I know), so we only lost out on “sink bites” when we were going slow and fighting fish like tuna, dorado, wahoo, sails, and striped marlin on the bars. We left the long ‘rigger ballyhoos out there and let them soak when we fought those kinds of fish, where they used to pick up a lot of bonus fish for us, so it seemed advisable to have the “meat smell” thing going for us in that situation.

That was case one. Case two happened not that many years ago and considering how much I have always experimented with and tweaked lures, my own lack of knowledge shocked the hell out of me. (Proving once again what I always say...I am older than dirt and because I have always screwed around with everything, trying to make it better, I have probably made more mistakes than any fisherman alive – but I have learned from them.)

Again, trying to keep it short, we had gone down to Cabo to test run a new high speed wahoo lure that we still haven’t introduced to the market yet because we’ve just been too busy and were having too many very unfortunate interruptions.

Anyway, I had rigged up six of the lures in the exact same way and the exact same colors, except that I had put small, 3” hollow squid teasers about a foot in front of two of the lures because I wanted to see how they would run with the teasers. Unless I was experimenting with traditional rigs, I rarely ran lures of any kind, but when I did, they always had a Moldcraft Little Bird no more than three feet in front of them – always. Thinking that the teasers wouldn’t mean a thing in high speed trolling, I left them on the two that had them. Proving to myself that I too can be the same kind of muddy-minded, tradition-bound thinker that I accuse many fishermen of being. Here’s what happened.

This took one time and one time only. We fished one primo wahoo tide on a favorite piece of structure very close to Cabo. Each lure ran out of each hole for a half hour, then they were all rotate one hole to the left. So each ran long rigger, short rigger and flat for an equal amount of time at the same speeds, on the same structure, on the same tide. That lure worked great, and if memory serves me correctly, we had eleven wahoo bites, hooked nine, and landed only six or seven. The low batting average was due to a huge bull sea lion that came out of nowhere and ate a ‘hoo we had leadered right off the wire, one that was lost because someone put a lure out that had a broken point (not one of my crew), and our anglers were all wahoo virgins and did some silly things.

The shocker wasn’t that the lure worked and was a good one, the shocker was that every single fish that hit, whether we caught it or not, hit one of those two lures with the little teasers on them! That blew my mind and as I wrote in my Wahoo book, I spent weeks trying to kick myself in the butt, wondering how many times I had been on ‘hoo, but didn’t get bit because I hadn’t had that little teaser on the lures to fire up their competitive instincts and get those non-feeders to take a kill shot. Considering how much I love wahoo and the further fact that The Baja is the home of world record ones, I assure you, realizing that I had missed fish because of the teaser thing was agony.

So this is the long way of saying that, even though our results weren't the same (probably due to the fact that he ran some fakes that we didn't), I really admire the way that Cappy Lindsay went about getting an answer to something that he and others probably had an opinion about based on a real world, one-on-one comparison. Like they say, opinions are like assholes...everybody’s got one. Facts are a helluva lot rarer and often have to be worked at to learn.

The truth is, this kind of experimentation is tough for those with limited time on the water available to them. Basically it is pretty much those who do spend a lot of time fishing, like we had the opportunity to do on a year-round basis down in Cabo, who can test and compare extensively, seeking the truth on many issues that fishermen are interested in. And on top of that, one has to have an inquisitive mind and a unique drive to actually go to the trouble of doing that kind of testing, instead of “just going fishing”. And, of course, wherever it was done, letting others know about it who haven’t had the opportunity to do the real deal, hard core testing themselves is probably the most special result of all, something that happens here a lot and that's a very good aspect of this terrific site.

Thanks, Capt Lindsay. It was really good to hear how you went about things and the results that you had. And the fact that we got very different results has taught me that some of the fake bally makers have probably improved their product...

But the right hollow squids are awesome bally immitations. Which is another story altogether. And spreaderbars made out of these lightweight beauts? Oh, baby! You know where to find it, right?

This picture is from the Wahoo Bible. 1. shows the fluourescent line we use. 2. shows the little squid, which has slid up the wire 3. shows the stopper for where the little squid teaser runs.