Short Bit Ballyhoo

[Gringo]

Now thats some good shit right there, I don't care who y'are.

Thanks Capt. Fred. I am still totally green at this kind of fishing, but learning more every day. I appreciate all the help I can get, and what you are doing here makes good sense to me.

[WAHOONBOX]

I'M SPEECHLESS.

[stockweiser]

Thanks Capt. Archer, you are generous to give out this info. I fish with an experienced crew and this will be a great read for all of them.

[gottaflylee]

Great read Capt. Fred, felt as if I was on the bridge with you... Thanks
I missed this the first time around!

[striper_on]

Thanks Capt. Fred. What a read

[Captain Fred Archer]

Good to see this thread revived. First, let me say that I'm not a fan of double hooks in 'hoos. I have tried a lot of different riggings and long story short, have never had very good results with them. I've had a lot more success "going to batting practice" and dropping back the way described in the original post. Seems to me that wahoo are like most other fish that hit a ballyhoo or other natural bait - they want it and they want the whole thing and I believe that in most cases we do some unnatural stuff that causes them to spook and not get caught.

I'll tell you boys, I have messed with ballyhoo since I was thirteen years old (see the picture) and caught them for a group of charterboats down in Miami, taking credits toward fishing trips, not money for them and the pinfish and mullet I used to get for them. It blows my mind to realize that was fifty-three years ago!

Ballyhoo have been in my fishing arsenal ever since, and when I followed my heart down to Cabo and lived the charter captain part of my dream, I brought them with me from over four thousand miles away because no one, and I do mean no one, used them down there...over two hundred charterboats and not a one using ballyhoo - imagine that!

I have always had love/hate relationship with the hoo's. Actually, I think a lot of the love side was part of the hate side. On the one hand I loved rigging them. To me, each one is kind of like tying a fly or making a lure. There is skill and workmanship in rigging each one and just like the flies and lures, if you do it wrong, you have crappy results. Do it right and you can't wait to plop each one in the water and watch it kick out the life that you put into it. That's mighty good stuff, if you ask me.

That's all well and good, but the flip sides aren't and after many decades of dealing with them, I have to admit that I found myself thinking more about the hate part than that fun part. Rigging up enough ballies for a full day offshore, especially in the tropics and a place where there were piles and piles of fish whacking the crap out of them was no small proposition and frankly, I got sick and tired of day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year of it. And I had a helluva hard time even thinking about forcing my crew to do the rigging, especially since they would have been the only ones in all of Cabo to be forced to do that kind of work and, truth be told, I really didn't trust anyone else to rig my ballies anyway. I'm sure that some of you know the feeling, right?

Then there was the cost of buying the baits. Forget the cost and effort it took to get them from Florida to Cabo and let's face the fact that a huge negative about ballyhoo is that they are like toilet paper... and worse yet, it's like toilet paper that you don't just buy and use once and then have to go buy more, you actually have to put time and effort into this "toilet paper" and if then along comes a runt bonito and he ruins if for you, or a good fish misses and messes it up, or it commits "blowouticide", or too much time goes by and that nice "fly you tied" or "lure that you made", and haven't caught shit with gets ripe and soft or stiff and stinky and you have to chuck it before you wind up with a maggot ranch that would choke a buzzard.

After way too many years of the good and the bad I decided that the bad outweighed the good and started looking for ways of first, cutting down on the number of ballyhoo that I had to buy and rig in the first place. Hell, have the Average Joe Fishermen and hard working, penny-pinching charter guys among us ever stopped and taken a good, hard look at what ballyhoo cost us to fish with?

Right up front, if you are like most of us, you have to have them shipped to you, and the bait and freight averages out to well over two bucks per bait for mediums, pretty much no matter where you live in the country the freight cost is almost exactly the same and it is a TON and it's gonna get higher, not lower! Then you have to store it, thaw what you're going to use, rig it, salt it, baking soda it, and ice it like it's beluga caviar or it'll go to hell on you. And then way too many of them don't even catch a fish for you...some get destroyed by gamefish, some by crapfish, some committ blowouticide and washouticide on their own, and maybe worst of all, some sit around doing nothing until you wind up having to cut up the rigging that you spent time doing and chucking them before that maggot ranch gets started.

All at over two bucks each, forget whatever the work you put into them was worth! MAN, THAT ADDS UP TO A PILE 'O CASH IF YOU FISH A LOT - OR EVEN IF YOU DON'T!

About the time that all of this really sank in, I was convinced that multiple lures, specifically spreaderbars, attracted and caught a helluva lot more fish than single lures. The next logical step was to rig bars and the little dredges (Spiders) that I like with ballyhoo, until, that is, I started adding up what a bar or Spider with a couple of dozen 'hoos would cost...Jumpin' Jehossofats, we're talking over fifty bucks worth of "toilet paper" in raw bait cost alone! Just the thought of a little gold mine's worth of hand-rigged and carefully cared for and coddled ballyhoo meeting up with a band of little bonito, jacks, kings, rat dorados or even little tunas and what they would do to that nice school of bait caused me to shake in my boots and I never, ever did that "multiple real bait stuff".

And so began literally decades of experimenting with the best alternative to the real deal that I have ever found - hollow squids - and when it comes to immitating ballyhoo, one specific kind of hollow squid, one that we call our ProSquids. They are made for us by an old friend in the tackle business. They are tough as hell, expensive as hell (for a squid, but they are dirt cheap if you can use them in place of real ballies - which you absolutely can).

My charter captain buddies and I have come up with a goodly number of ways to fish ProSquids and regular hollow squids that catch the hell out of the schooling pelagics and billfish that leave using real ballies in the dust. In the process we have saved ourselves a pile of money that we would have spent on bait that you have to do the "toilet paper thing" with. Instead, we have invested what wound up being a pittance on "ballyhoo" (squid, flyers, little dolphin and tuna too, even sauries and such) that we only had to buy once, that didn't need to be air freighted or kept in a freezer or on ice, that required little or no rigging, that didn't commit blowouticide or washouticide and that most little rat fish couldn't hurt, or at least not "fatally" and cost very little to replace if they did, and a long list of other good things, including a hookup/landing ratio on billfish that closely approaches 100% (you read that right - 100%!)

This stuff is way too much to discuss and describe here. It's all in the new Marlin Lure book that applies directly to the tunas, dolphins, and wahoos too. I am posting up just a few pages for you to get an idea of the kinds of things you will find in this book - things that I promise you, you have never heard of before and that really work AND save you a bunch of money. Here goes...

And yes, that kid with the sailfish is me...how long have you been billfishing?

[Chuck Richardson]

Here are few Ballyhoo rigs I found in our archives that might be another alternative to the "short-bites"

Top one is a Double Hook Split-Bill
Next is a Double Hook Weedless Rig
Third is a Single Hook Weedless
Standard Double Hook Rig w/Hooks at 180deg.
Last one is a Standard Double Hook Rig

Obviously any one of them would take more time to rig than a conventional single hook rig but, rigging baits should not be about how fast you can rig them. Have at it!!!!