How essential are teasers in your spread?

[Captain Fred Archer]

"Toadmeister"? "TOADMEISTER?!"" WHO are you guys calling "Toadmeister", damnit? If there were to be a Toadmeister, it danged well oughta be ME! I (yeah, me, the incorrigible spammer) made a gift out of this thing back when I first posted "a million dollar fishing tip for free!" and now I'm a fading memory as the Toad starts to take off and do the things I promised - to blow your mind with it's awesome action and (some have found and the rest of you who run it will too) that it raises and then turns fish on like mad because it represents a fish feeding on your spread and that's one helluva dinner bell for other fish. [You should always drag a Toad in your spread. (I'm getting that in before the first bass guy says, "Man, Toads make stripers crazy!" and becomes, uh, lessee, oh yeah, "ToadBassCatcherDude", or something like that.)

Seriously, Shoefish, I am delighted to see you and others experimenting and having your eyes opened to Toad Power. And of course, I loved that video. It was especially worth it to me hearing your trepidation and doubt at first, "will it work?" stuff and then hearing the surprise and excitement in your voice and that of the camera guy when Toad started to get down and Salsa.

By the same token, I have to admit the doubt you expressed was also a disappointment. Anything that I bring here I bring because it works. If it didn't, I wouldn't bring it, period! I have a long and treasured history as not only an outdoor writer and author, but moreso as an innovator and straight shooter in the tackle industry and I guard that with everything that I have.

Here's just one example (that I know will fire a few folks up, but shouldn't). Daisy chains. At one time years ago, they were the leading edge stuff that a handful of us taught a goodly percentage of fishermen about. Those of you who read my earliest books and articles know that I pushed them like mad. And I'm almost positive that it was me who came up with the first "Jumping Squid Daisy Chain".

There are over 350 multiple lures in our catalog. You will not find a single daisy chain among them now, while in the long ago past, there were many. Why? Because the spreaderbar is what the daisy chain evolved into long ago. Bars, especially DaisyBars, do everything that chains did, only many times better. And so we don't sell bars in spite of the fact that we could sell plenty of them. Instead, we try to move people up to bars and if we can't, we decided a long time ago not to offer what is now a second-rate system. We miss some sales because of this, but by not endorsing what we believe to be old technology and replacing it with improvements like SuperBars and especially our new DaisyBars, we remain what we consider to be exclusively involved in modern, leading edge technology.

Sure, daisy chains still catch a lot of fish and there are plenty of people who make them; it's just that we don't.

Some Toad advice, if you don't mind.

Keep experimenting with the weights. Bigger ones rigged just below the Toad's "lip" should give you a tighter wiggle and more frantic action, which I at least think is the ultimate Toad wiggle.

Use heavy mono of at least 400# for the loop that the sinkers ride on. Lighter stuff can chafe through on you pretty quickly.

And remember that it is that image of feeding competition I mentioned that you are trying to duplicate with this teaser. Because of that, the ideal setup is the Toad chasing a teaser that is the same exact one as those on the spreaderbars that it runs in front of and under.

I rig front teasers on a short, reversed dropper. The teaser squid is mounted using a "winged" or regular split shot, which makes it easy to change teasers when you change bars - just slide the splitshot off or cut it, slip on another squid and squeeze on another shot. As long as you don't run it too far in front of the Toad, the teaser will never get bit...it is just there to complete the competitive scene that you are setting.

We vastly prefer running Toads off of rods and reels hung off the lower arm of an UpRigger. That was shown here by someone, I believe it was Johnny Walker. The UpRigger is perfect for this, takes up no room and makes the teaser rod and reel a snap to work with. The reel allows you to experiment with how far back you run your Toad, something that it's a good idea to experiment with.

Stick with the bigger Toads offshore. If you run the smaller, 13" stuff, they become food, not competition and everything from whitey, to bluefin, to bigeye to blues will try to eat it on you.

"Booby trapping" a Toad is almost exclusively a shark and marlin trolling thing and is an art in and of itself that I discuss thoroughly in my various books.

Here's an important tip when there are marlin or game sharks around. Toads have a kind of "built in bite alarm" that you need to be aware of. If a marlin, mako, thresher, or any other fish hits it, it gets knocked off balance and zooms up to the top, where it will slide or zig-zag for a bit before diving back down again. It's easy to see this and not realize what just happened and just wait for the Toad to dig back in and go down again, instead of pitching a bait back to the fish. You can eliminate this by booby trapping your Toad if the marlin or sharks are around.

There are more tips to using Toads, but I don't have all night, so here is the last one for now. I hate using big live baits for marlin because so many of them get throat hooked and choke and die on you before you can get to and release them. So, being the convoluted thinker that I am, I ran some "armed (with hooks)" ones on the inshore black marlin grounds. We caught fish on them, too. We had a couple use the weight of the Toad to toss the hook on us on them, so we taped it on so that it would break partially away from the Toad after the hookup. I'll try to find a picture of one. I hasten to add that this works and might get you a big blue, but I think that booby trapping works far better.

Finally, this is a hard place to try to bring new and innovative things to. I have tried hard, but sure have gotten beaten up over being some kind of spam master to being willing to sell a glass of water to a drowning person (I actually thought that was kinda cool...I think maybe I could do that, but I don't like the implication that I would try to). I'm getting tired of taking heat just because I don't live on the east coast anymore, or I shake people up because I'm not traditional and am always dealing with what is usually new stuff to a lot of people and that makes some of them uncomfortable and they view it as a sales pitch, or whatever.

I make my living and have for more than fifty years now dealing with the leading edge in fishing tackle. You probably don't know it, but many of you are fishing with reels that I not only had a huge hand in the development of, but that I actually named and this was for TWO companies, not just one. Both started out unknowns and became industry leaders because of those reels. I don't go around bragging about that sort of thing, but it is damned well the truth. And much of what I try to give away here is golden stuff for the major mags and I take a lot of heat from them, and they pay me a lot of money for what I give away here, for doing what I do on this site in particular.

Just today, a major publisher of one of the top three saltwater magazines took me to task for "wasting" time trying to introduce people to new, leading edge stuff and not simply providing it to the print media and my books and getting paid, instead of being worked over for it. I wasn't going to name the publisher, but what the hell, I might as well...this time it was Lenny Belcaro of Big Game Journal. He not only chewed me out for "giving away gold for nothing but grief", he pounded the hell out of me for not providing him with press releases that he would run for nothing and that are worth their weight in gold and instead of producing them, have been "wasting time trying to help Internet guys who don't pay a dime for it and who turn around and kick you in the ass like some junk lure peddler instead."

Ouch!

I'm gonna keep it up, though, at least for the time being. And as far as the "Toadmeister" thing is concerned, I'll tell ya what, I'll settle for "Toad Daddy", how's that?

Anybody want a glass of water?

That hot little rocket in the lower left corner is something very, very special. I won't "pitch" it here. Like all the rest, it's in the catalog.

[shoefish]

I by no means meant to steal your thunder or insult you or your products if that's how you took my post. I'm not smart enought to come up with something so simple but so ingenious (does that make sense?) I obviously got the inspiration to try it from one of your threads.

In terms of the hesitation that you speak of, I think that's just human nature- people do what they are comfortable with and with what has worked in the past. I actually like the fact that I was hesitant on the video before I saw it swim, and that you can hear in my voice when it swims well. I think that is realistic, and is the natural reaction for many people to have.

In terms of the tips, I think rigging on heavier mono would be the thing to do like you said. The 130# was what I had around, and I was dying to try it out, so I used it. It hasn't broken or chaffed yet, but you could see how it would do that.

Again, I hope you didn't think that I was insulting the idea or you. It was purely an experiment inspired by one of your toad posts.

Shoe

[reelparadise]

Does it have to be painted? It looks in the one pic that you could possibly use sharpies? Anyway looks like something i definitely want to have in my spread. Do you try to resemble another fish? Like a bluefin or yellowfin or dolphin. Do you want your design to be an exact replica of another gamefish?
thanks for the advice
Reel

[Captain Fred Archer]

Shoe...I apologize if I came off like I was mad at you. I was just kidding around (that's what the "Toad Daddy" at the end was about) and I guess it gets hard to tell the difference between me being serious and funnin' around.

Actually, instead of being mad at you, I was delighted to see all of the stuff that you did to build and check out a Toad for yourself and then shared here. You should have seen the SEG I had on my face while I listened to you and the tape shooter reacting to what you saw happening and I think it opened a lot of other peoples' eyes when it comes to what a froggy can do for you. I sure hope everybody checks that video out. If they don't, they are really missing out on something that could radically improve their results.

Hopefully, just seeing you handling and deploying and running Toady will help bring one of the most important aspects of Toads to the viewers - that unlike most other teasers, it is there to create a dynamic, wild "fish up and feeding on the bars or lures" image that simply blows hot or cold gamefish away and gets them to join in and pile on rightfriggin'now! There are very few teasers out there that do that and for the most part, they have heavy negatives about them, like being hard and banging up the fish, the boat, and sometimes even the fisherman, and they are expensive as all get out on top of that, while Toads are damned near free. But again, Toadsters should always remember what a Toad's purpose is, because this will allow them to place it where it will do the most good in the spread.

Most of the time, running a Froggy off a short corner, like you would do with a conventional teaser, doesn't work very well with them, again, because of what they are supposed to represent. A feeding predator doesn't make much sense if it's ahead of the prey; it belongs right back there under the lures so when the good stuff joins it, there's all kinds of stuff for them to eat and get hooked on. At one point in your vid you have the Toad back a ways and in spite of maybe being on the light side, it dove way down there to the point where it was pretty hard to see. That should give folks an idea of how far Froggy will get down when you put it back and under or between the lures.

Even though I kind of suspect that your Toad was a little underweight and maybe had the sinkers a bit too far in front, this can be controlled by both adjusting the weights OR the air pressure of the teaser. We carry little bike or ball pumps for inflating/deflating ours and my goal is a pretty tight wiggle. You'll know you have it right if you lift the rod into the regular upright position and it feels for all the world like you have just locked up on a hot tuna. When that happens you can be sure that the Toad is kicking out all of the right vibrations and because they are in water, they are traveling far and wide. Boom!

Reel Paradise...Yes, you can use Permanent Magic Markers and they do a pretty good job, but you want to get ones with the biggest tips to make things go faster. No matter what kind of ink or paint you use, it's always a good idea to rough up the fender's surface with sandpaper or heavy steel wool.

The painting and all of that is more for fun than it is to attract fish. Some of the best performers I have ever used were old, gnarly, dirty, ugly looking suckers that I found in the trash, floating around the harbor, or wasting away in somebody's dock box. I suspect that these look a lot like squid, but don't know for sure, but they sure worked!

Fish live in a competitive world that makes ours look like holding hands and dancing around a May Pole. They live under the gun of making split decisions, or reactions I should say, or a schoolmate, another kind of fish, a bird, a porpoise or any one of a myriad of other competitors will get a vulnerable bait before he does. That is the core of multiple lure fishing and big teasers and is why that is almost all that I run, no matter what kind of fish I'm targeting.

Finally, my rant at the end wasn't pointed at you guys, but was more in frustration because some here - not too many, though, are quick with the sarcasm and spam bullshit over things that they would likely never see if I didn't post about them here, but slow with the thanks when it comes to something truly terrific, like Toads, that do me no monetary good at all and are meant simply to help people catch more fish.

What I DO get out of that sort of thing is the same and most important thing that I get from hearing about a bunch of fish caught on something that I created and somebody bought. In the end, to me at least, it's the same as running a top-flight, heavily producing charterboat...it ain't for the money, that's for shit sure...it's for the love of seeing your actions result in people catching fish, having a ball, and hopefully, beginning a love affair with the seas and their creatures so that maybe they can help us beat the bad guys some day. NOBODY gets rich or even remotely close to it in the lure business!

Buy into that or don't. That's the way it is with me.

So, hey, Toadmeister, do I have to tell you how happy, not angry, you made me? Toad on, my man! And be sure to have Froggy hopping around there if you go after the linesiders, too! Oh, mercy! And beware of the threshers when you are in the green. They LOVE Toads and just beat the crap out of them over and over again. Have a wire leader ready to pitch if you want to catch one, or better yet, booby trap the Toad. As someone wrote in the older threads, when it comes to offshore sharks it is the makos that jump all over Toads. Here too, booby trapping is the way to go if you want to catch those guys.

One thing that I remain adamant about is using a couple of armed Spider dredges instead of the big momma's. This is especially so for those with smaller boats and crews, but it's what we do on our big boats too. Along with all of their other advantages that I have listed before, they are a helluva lot less expensive, too.

ToadDaddy, out.