Dredges versus Spreader Bars

[Murph]

I know a lot of guys fish spreader bars up north an have success in bringing in whole smathering of fish from tuna to whitey. How many guys have fished with a dredge though?

I was first introduced to fishing with dredges down in Mexico, we used a mix of rplastic baits and split tail mullet. We ran a 6 arm dredge with two connection on each dredge arm and two baits off each connection, for a total of 24 baits acting as a large school. We have also at times run a double dregde but the drag is massive in the water and it can be a real pain when clearing the dredge.

It has been an incredible tool for bringing in fish if you have tried them. I know that guys also like the strip teaser, though I have seen what some guys have gone through when the strip teasers foul or become delaminated. I remember Marty talking about fishing a tournament last year and the bills coming right up into the dredge all lit up.

So who has tried dredges and what kind split tails or strip teasers etc. or something else.

[SharkJP]

Murph, I fish the spreader bars and the dredge differently. I will use the spreader bars with hook baits and very rarely as teasers. I do have a few mini bars that I will run as teasers from time to time while tuna fishing, but for the most part, i use them with hook baits.

For the dredges, i use them exclusively as teasers. I also really only use the strip teasers. After seeing what they will do in the water, it is just unreal. I will run them out of either corner, just under or around my flat line baits. Alot of where the dredges are run depend on the type of wake that particular boat puts out. AS for how I run then, it is either with a dredge rod, wich is basically a planner rod, or with a downrigger. Personally I like the dredge rod more, but that is a lot of money to spend if you will just be using it on the dredge. I think it is easier with the rod, especially when I will have as much as 100oz out there to keep the dredge where I want it. Its placement in the water column depends on what the fish are doing and what type of boat I am in. It does no good to have a dredge out and you cant see it. If you are going to run a dredge deep, make sure its from a boat with a tower where you can actually see it. From my boat with no tower, i generally wont run it more than a few feet below the surface. Like i said, it does no good to have a bill all over your dredge and have no idea he is there and not be able to pick him off. Now, to pick a fish off a dredge. . . . well thats a whole other discussion. . . lol

[OffTheHookB&T]

They are a must for fishing for Whites. One thing you have to watch for especially on boats w/out towers is for Whitey to sneak and have a snack when you're not lookin I've used mainly split tail mullet on the boats I've fished with. During the Mid-Atlantic 500 we could keep split tails in the shop! Some guys we're using 2 triple dredges For the heavier set-ups I suggest a downrigger in a foward rod holder, this makes much easier to handle. Hopefully the Marlin man himself, DEEPC, wiil add his two cents to this thread.

[Capt-D]

Non tourney fishing, I regularly use a dredge loaded with mold craft tuff hoos. I like the tuff hoos over the bullyhoo (i think Calcutta) because of the swimming action provided by the tail! I will either cleat it or run it on a teaser reel depending on the weight and depth that I want them. I also have tried them on a short teaser rod setup that I have put together. That works better in getting the whites off of it and onto another bait with the quick retrieve.

I will also run spreaders with and without hook baits. I rarely run different hook baits that are non squid behind them. If I run a hook, it will be a different color squid, next size up, and weighted with twice the spacing of the rest of the baits. All my spreaders are rigged with snaps inside the last mainline bait for this reason.

Just my way!

-D

[OffTheHookB&T]

Capt D, I never tried the Tuff Hoos, gotta try that next season. When not running dead bait, Got-cha shad bodies work great, they look amazing on a dredge!

[Capt-D]

I have thought of using large shads to make it a little cheaper, but those tuff hoos are just that. I have yet to have them destroyed by a white. With that said, I have on two occasions had the hoo slash apart the dredge. When I get home today ill post a pick of how i rigged them in-line. (looks a little odd, but the action is great!)

-D

[Double D]

I started draggin a tournament cable hoo dredge this year, and it really looks great. The problem is that it costs about $30 every time whitey gets in there and wacks it around. The Mann ultimate hoos are about $3 each

The tough hoo is even more, but if they hold up better it may be worth it in the long run

[Murph]

Yeah I know wat you mean dredges can be pretty messed up by wahoo's. The split tail mullets mixed in have worked fairly well but as with other baitfish it requires maintenance and keeping up with switching bait out as they get washed out.

[Sterling]

When I run spreader bars I run them off my corners without the flat line clip. I always read about running them off the short riggers but I haven't been able to get them to run right from there. Anyone else find that?
I typically connect a green machine (with a hook) about 4 feet behind the last squid (snap swivel in the last squid).

I frequently pull an umbrella dredge with about 19, 6" clear rubber fish that have holograms inside them. I picked it up at last years Miami show from Chaos. It's a teaser only and I run it up to about 6.5kts about 20 feet back off the back left cleat. Clearing it during multiple hookups can be a hassle but the real downside for me is that I'm often not positioned to watch it and I've lost many a rubber fish off it without ever getting a shot at the culprit. As OffTheHookB&T notes, it's important to keep an eye on it. And as SharkJP mentioned, if you don't always have someone up high, don't run it too deep.

In 06 I'm thinking of running a flat line with a 12"+ lure (i.e. Compleat Wahoo Death or large deep runner) close behind it to either hook any shoppers or push them over to another bait. I've got 5 months to plan and replan spreads so that could all change.

Rarely do I run the dredge and the spreaders at the same time.

[Captain Fred Archer]

I have had too many bad experiences with dredges and gave up on them a long time ago. Problems were...
1. The aforementioned wahoos. There are a lot of them in Cabo, where I fish. Whether it's natural baits or artificial ones, one visit from a big FangBanger or worse yet (oh no!) a pack of them and out of the water and off to the bench ($) goes a trashed dredge. This is not good when you are in the charter business, your people crave a 'hoo or two and that/those was/were the only ones to show all day.
2. Another bad visitor is a mako, especially a small one. They don't attack in packs, like the 'hoo's, but a little guy will trash a couple of baits on you right now. These nasties show up too regularly in both Cabo and California.
3. Speaking of California, the real nightmare there is the thresher shark, unbeknownst to many, a great troll fish (at least ten-to-one, trolling versus chumming). A whiptail comes in and tries to do what comes naturally, slap the crap out of as many "baits" in a school as possible, then comes back around to pick up the stunned and killed victims. A thresher can lop a big bonito right in half like it was cut with a razor sharp ax, so I don't suppose that I have to tell anyone what they do to a dredge and its teasers. Very not good! (See the picture that follows of a thresher and a victim that fell out of its stomach when we weighed it.)
4. Those three fish are bad enough, but our striped marlin can be very bad dredge candidates too. A single is one thing, but many times they attack in packs and when they do they get very aggressive and there is none of this "after you, Alphonse" b.s. They bail into a dredge en masse and nothing good comes of it, except for teaser or natural bait suppliers.
5. We have another fish in Cabo that is a real nightmare when it comes to cutting up dredges. It is the sierra mackerel, which are kissin' cousins to spanish and that other toothy family member whose name escapes me at the moment. As soon as one hits the 100 line, which can be a couple of hundred yards off the beach in Cabo, the big sierras can become dredge terminators on you. These are the deep water models that run from 8 - 18#. They are exactly like mini wahoos, except that I think that they have an even worse bite. They are big time school fish and when a pack of them comes on a shredding mission, disaster is at hand. Why not move further offshore where we rarely encounter them? Because the 100 line is such a great producer of blue, black and striped marlin, tuna, wahoo, and dorado. We often drag a big sierra in the ten to twelve pound class off a long rigger for the big marlin on the hundred because we know that the big boys have a sweet tooth for sierra's and hunt them on that curve. More often than not it is a big 'hoo that takes the chin weighted sierra - they love them too.
6. Big yellowfin are trouble when they get after a dredge too.

I have towers on both of my boats, but I'll tell you what; most of these fish come in so hot and fast that by the time I hollered "Get that dredge out!" it was too late. For some of those fish, the wahoos and sierras in particular, a lightning strike wouldn't come fast enough to get the dredge away from those fangs.

What it all adds up to is that I quit fooling around with dredges a lot of years ago. The costs and problems in handling them on a typical charter day were way to much for my operation.

The way that I see it there are a couple of teaser prinicples that one can opt for. The first is the dredge concept of loading the pattern up with at least one bunch of bait and dredges are very good for this. The other is the one that serves me the best. It is to load up the pattern with numerous little pods of bait being chased by little predator fish. Like someone else here said for his, my chasebaits are always hollow squids, as are my teasers. I not only make bars, I have fished them for literally thousands of days and because I make them, tweaked them in any and all ways that I could think of on just about every one of those days, I found out that there is zero need for any other kind of teaser or chasebait - and believe me, I tried 'em all. If you have the right kind of bar, built the right way, you can get any kind of speed or action that you could ever ask for out of them.

So my philosophy is that yes, I want to pack as much "chum" as I can into my pattern, but I want it to be in the form of little, broken up pods of baits with the little predators that broke them up chasing and about to catch them. This...
1. Spreads my the "chum" out and in the sweet spots in my wake for maximum visibility. (I do "pack" my bars close to each other in the #3 and #4 sweetest of them all (for me) spots.)
2. I have a hook in every bait that is going to be the first that gets bit (the chasebait) in each "ball of chum", so anyone who visits or snipes gets a hook in his face.
3. This kind of presentation tends to break up a gamefish school's initial formation and spreads the targets out so that rather than having them attack one bait school with no hook in it, they can spread out a little and have numerous baits for different fish in the school to target and get caught on.
4. I take the idea of having predators in and attacking the "chum" even further by always running a Toad teaser that is chasing a squid that is the same size and color as the ones on the bars spring mounted on a short dropper two feet in front of the Toad. This looks exactly like a small tuna or big bonito attacking the bars that has cut a bait out and is trying to catch it. At times I will run a Toad off of each corner employing UpRiggers so I can run the teaser and a lure out of the same corner rod holder. The Toads are always run back under the spreaderbars so that as deep fish are raised by them they see the bars above them and go after them. This really works, folks. Big time!
5. During calm conditions I run the Toad (I never troll without one in the pattern, even if I am fishing the inshore stuff) off one side or down the middle and a BIG surface teaser like a Legend Lure Zeus (pictured below) off a corner and close to the bars. Like the Toad, it isn't meant to be a gamefish target, but instead another competitor, this one crashing and smashing and ka-whomping out fish attracting noises of the finest kind. Of course it too is chasing one of the same squid teasers as are on the bars.

There is more to all of this, but I'm not here to write a book. Mine are full of this sort of thing, but in far greater detail and with lots of photo's and rigging diagrams. There's not enough room for all of that here, but I am trying to pass on the guts of an approach that I have found to be extremely productive for me that is easy and economical to boot.

And please, I am in no way knocking dredges or trying to talk anyone out of using them. If they work for you, by all means, use them. Likewise, if what I do makes sense to you, by all means, use it.

And prepare to have your mind blown and your string stretched!

(I'll tell you one thing, though. If I were still using dredges I'd sure get me some of those new folding ones that those Cut Metal folks make. Storing those babies used to be a real pain - that kind sure looks sweet!)

Here's that chopper thresher and his victim (pacific barracuda), Zeus, an UpRigger doing its thing and my friend, Mister Toad.