Dredges versus Spreader Bars

[O-SEA-D]

I pull a Strip teaser dredge off one of the corners when I am offshore fishing usually. During Spring time when the big hoo's are around I don't like to put it out. I have about 8-10 pounds of weight in front of my dredge to get it down deep. The problem is I can't see it like you guys said. Heck, on a Center Console your not going to see much of anything unless its on the surface. Maybe this year I will take some weight off and make it so I can see it when I am trolling.

I mainly pull the dredge to get the attention of the fish to get them into the spread. I also pull the normal squid chains as teasers off each out rigger.

I have pulled a spreader bar 1 time on my boat. Problem is keeping it up high enough to keep the bar out of the water. Its hard to do sometimes. I think I might scale down to a smaller bar this year and try it out during Spring fishing season. The bar I have now hs a Calcutta 48" bar and I have about 15 of the 9" Mold Craft squid on it. So, its a pretty heavy bar and you can't pull it back to far because the bar ends up in the water.

[Captain Fred Archer]

John,

I see that you have had the same kind of experience that I did with the dredges and wahoos. If you like using them you are lucky to live where they aren't year-round residents like they are down in Cabo. Since I love fishing for and catching wahoo, I don't consider myself unlucky because of that. The first time a pack of small ones piled onto a dredge with meticulously rigged ballyhoo (from Florida) on it was the beginning of the end for dredges for me. One minute I was standing in my tuna tower watching how neat that thing looked and a split second after the FangBanger gang arrived it looked like my ballies had been run over by a power lawnmower! Not good.

I have been making spreaderbars for over fifteen years now, so maybe I can offer up some advice that will make them both easier for you to use and the kind of fish catchers that will have you trolling sets of them all the time. Very early on we quit using the molded body squids like Moldcraft and Boone make. Before spreaderbars we used them extensively as teasers on short, "spring" leaders on what we called "jumping squid daisy chains" because they jumped all over the place in front of a chasebait lure. We built very few bars out of them and tried them only a couple of times before deciding to use hollow squids only on our bars. That was because the molded squids are a lot stiffer and heavier than the hollow models and the latter swim through the water much better and more naturally than the molded ones. And because of their weight, bars with molded squids pulled a lot harder than the hollow variety.

I have found bars made from the composite material that we use in our SuperBars to be far superior to metal bars in many ways, not the least of which is staying out of the water when trolled at a wide range of speeds. They also don't kink or break (and we guarantee that they won't break), most troll terrific at all speeds up to more than twelve knots, they don't rust or corrode or have components that do that, they don't have metal connectors hanging off of them to promote tangling and add weight, and best of all, they simply do not tangle themselves or with each other. Metal bars are available all over the place and don't require all of the labor and special tooling and labor required to make composite ones, so the easy way for me to make bars would be to use metal - but there is no way that they would do all of the above and so I don't make them that way.

SuperBars also don't "want" to get in the water. Keeping it simple, their very light weight and round shape cause an "airfoil effect", just like an airplane wing and being forced and compressed between them and the water's surface creates aerodynamic lift that actually has a lot to do with SuperBars staying out of the water.

We have a forty page e-catalog that features our complete line of SuperBars. I will be happy to send it to you so that you can check out our lineup - it is big.

Here are a couple of shots of SuperBars running. First, some running close, off of UpRiggers and not pinned down and the next one is one side of a spread that goes from the short corner all the way back to the long rigger position. See how the SuperBar bars stay out of the water? The last shot speaks for itself as far as tangling is concerned.

[SharkJP]

Capt Fred,

you have some great tips. . .KEEP IT UP!!!!!!!

this is one heck of a thread so far.

[Madchark]

Very detailed information Fred, Nice work.

[Chasin Tale]

Murph,
On my boat we use the middle sized 'strip tease'. We have also attached a separate surface teaser with snap directly to the downrigger wire pulling the strip dredge. Takes just a second to unsnap before reeling in the rest of the dredge for clearing.
Yes whitey likes it as well as the pezvela's. I did have a de-lamination problem after an entire pod of schoolies tried to engulf the thing all at once.
If you put hooks in that and run a weed line, you could reel in a dozen dolphin at a time with the penn fathom master. Talk about circus on a wire...