I love bait & switch our way...why?

[Captain Fred Archer]

I love bait and switch fishing for marlin. It is without a doubt my favorite way of fishing for them (tuna and other pelagics too). That love began way back when I first saw it done by Jerry Dunaway and Skip Smith on The Madam and Hooker and Stewart Cambell et al on Chunda. They are the ones with more world record billfish in the book than anybody, and by a bunch. Virtually all of those fish came via bait & switch fishing. I started out doing as they did, running Moldcraft Softheads. Then, after a short stint of running daisychain teasers, we switched to spreaderbars especially designed as teasers...and never looked back!

I have might have had more experience both designing and actually fishing with spreaderbars than anyone that I have ever heard of - literally thousands of days and over twenty years of it, so hopefully this will help those unfamiliar with them. They truly do make wonderful and very effective lures and teasers. Some advantages of the lightweight, composite teaser bars of today are...

They make it easy to put “schools” of bait in the hottest spots in your spread. Two of our MeatBall Teaser Bars put fifteen-to-twenty teasers ranging from 3” to 9” in each hole that you put them in. Our RuckusRaiser Bars put from twelve-to-fifteen of the same size teasers in each hole, each in a hysterically running school presentation.

Of course, bait travels in the aforementioned schools, not as singles or as unnatural strings of bait, like with daisychains. And if you like daisy chains you will probably wind up loving spreaderbars, especially the sleek, slender, lightweight bars DaisyBars, daisychain and spreaderbar crossbreeds featuring the best of both of those lures that we have developed because they are what the daisychain has evolved into.

Our teaser bars are literally five daisychains arranged in a realistic, “panicking school” shape with many more teasers than a chain fished off a single rod, not five of them. It is a huge, logical advance in multiple lure fishing and it simply represents what marlin and all other gamefish hunt for every day of their lives – schools of bait.

Teaser Bars and RuckusRaisers are incredibly light, with the bars themselves weighing small fractions of an ounce and with the hollow squid teasers adding a very small amount of additional weight. This makes the handling, deployment, retrieving and putting them aboard or up in the ‘riggers a snap. The bars themselves are indestructible and we guarantee them against breaking for the life of the original owner. They are also very easy to stow anywhere that you see fit and are very easy to travel with. And unlike most teaser lures and daisychains, our teaser bars have been designed to run at a wide range of speeds, from very slow to far faster than you would believe or maybe that you might not even want to troll them at once you see it for yourself. They are available with teasers in nine sizes ranging from three inches to twenty and in many colors, so the all-important matching of the hatch is broadly covered.

Fish actually often grab conventional lure teasers and daisychains (invariably the last one in line in the case of the chains) due to the simple expedient that both the single lure and the last one in a daisychain stand out as individual, straggling baits and thus become targets. We don’t care for that and would rather forgo getting into tugs of war with fish that have grabbed teasers, no matter the species. We prefer just pitching or dropping back and hooking them up.

In order to accomplish that, we rig teaser bars with all of the last teasers in a straight line, i.e. even with one another. This eliminates any teaser that appears to be a “straggler”. If you know your marlin and most other pelagic species, you know that they don’t attack intact schools of bait, but rather, chase and attempt to flush singles or a few out so that they can target them. The pod is the baitfish’s first line of defense, so by designing our teaser bars as described, it is rare indeed for a billfish to attack the teaser pod itself. OUR “bait schools” simply will not break up, no matter what a fish does to them. Instead, most turn themselves inside out trying to flush a single out of it. And when one suddenly appears – i.e. your pitch bait - it is immediately gobbled down. Ditto for the other gamefish...yes, including wahoo!

And in the case of billfish that sometimes school up themselves, like sails, whites and stripers, it wasn’t unusual at all for us to bait and hook up one, let him clear the teasers, then pitch to the next one after the teasers and so on and so on. As long as we had the right kind of anglers aboard (not always the case on a charterboat), many times we did this until we had hooked up as many marlin or other species as we thought that our guests could handle.

Just seeing a pod of lit-up marlin competing for a couple of teaser bars on the short corners is one very exciting scene in and of itself. Between that and the “sight bites” (actually seeing fish eat the bait) drove some higher strung folk nuts and they couldn’t be trusted to do the pitching part. That still didn’t stop us from doing the bait & switch fishing that we preferred. In those cases my crew, who were masters at it, did it for them. It does take some getting used to, that’s for sure. But once mastered, especially that “nerves” part, it’s actually very easy.

(See the picture below for what is pretty much an “automatic” pitch that works well with excitable or inexperienced anglers and for those with small crews.)

Regular pitch bait procedure followed with a ballyhoo or whole, small squid. We wound up pitching a hollow squid that matches the teasers in size, but in a different color...the artificial looks as good, and probably better than the real deal, plus it's a lot tougher and it represents what the fish were trying to flush out of the bait pod in the first place.

We did not have any hook baits or lures in the pattern, the reason being that some very big fish used to climb all over them, so we had to run them on big gear, just in case. But that defeated some of the best aspects of the technique – such as matching the tackle to the size of the fish and picking out which size and species we wanted to catch, or just as importantly, not catch. That is a big part of the versatility and beauty of bait and switch fishing in the first place. We simply didn't want to hook the sails, smaller marlin, or other, smaller pelagics on the howitzers that were right for the big gorilla's, but wrong for the dinks, so there were no hook baits in the water when we were fishing the teaser bars and so there were no tackle versus fish size mistakes. This too was better for our customers from the standpoint of fighting and catching their fish on the appropriate size gear.

There’s another really neat thing about pure, no-armed lure bait and switch bar fishing. That’s not taking chances of hooking smaller fish on gear too heavy for them. Considering the fact that there was a terrific alternative to that, plus the fact that we were in a diverse species fishery with a broad mix of species’ and sizes, mostly after the same bait, bait & switch was perfect for us.

Restrictive limits on meat species also dictated that we didn’t waste a lot of them catching them once those limits were achieved. And coupled with customers who were sometimes not interested in certain fish, but only one, like marlin, sails, tuna, big bulls, or even wahoo, that ability to not get caught with our tackle pants down when it came to what we hooked on what tackle was simply terrific for us and them.

Heck, this was Cabo in the old days, when it wasn’t just possible, it wasn’t unusual at all to have customers get flat worn out from catching bills or tuna and not wanting to catch any more of one or the other, or even both, instead preferring to go for some dorado or maybe a wahoo. It was easy and fun (remember, fishing is supposed to be fun) to accommodate them by bait and switch fishing and if a big tuna or maybe a blue showed up and they changed their minds and wanted to go for it, it was a simple matter of just grabbing the right rig, pitching it and we’d wind up going backwards far more often than not! I call that having your cake and eating it too!

There’s more to this and other approaches to marlin fishing in my marlin book, including how to fish bars to comply with IGFA rules and much more, but this ain’t a book, so for now, just let me leave you with a few additional thoughts.

If you are new to bait and switch fishing, please bear in mind that more is not better; in fact for me, it's bad, so we usually fished the two teaser bars only on the short corners, flat. Of course, I have always believed that any marlin worth his bill that comes into my pattern would find his way to those sweet spots with the teaser bars in them as long as I didn’t tempt him with something else behind him, like baits or lures on the long riggers.

Now that’s me and how I feel based on my own personal experience and you may not agree. If that’s the case and if you have a big enough boat and crew and the talent you can run up to four teaser bars, but I don’t recommend that you run more than that or that you don’t run them very far back so you can see and work whatever comes after those longer ones. Big boat or small, there will be no problem on the short corner ones...those fish will look like they are right in your lap!

Remember, bar teased fish don't get hooked at all if you aren't after that species and you don’t bait them. So, you avoid catching whatever you’re not interested in catching, or whatever might be harassing the hell out of you and destroying bunches of ballyhoo on you, but you can target whatever kind of fish you are after...and even there, you can pick and choose whatever size meat or kind of fish that you do want to catch if you happen to be “marlin only fishing” and a humungous dorado or whatever shows up in the teasers and you or your passengers want to catch it. That is utter logic as far as myself and many others who use this approach are concerned.

Finally, yes, paying attention to your spread is important when bait and switch fishing, but hey, it’s important all of the time, even when running armed stuff or you will miss tangles, trash that's been picked up, washed or blown out naturals and with teasers, seeing raised fish and sizing them up to pitch to or not.

That’s it for now. Very different than how many people fish? Yes. But it is one that myself and others have had a great deal of success with for many years that I believe many others would too.

Hope some enjoyed.

Picts...teaser bars...RuckusRaiser teaser at 8 knots (also makes a great dredge)