Spreader bars for kingfish?

[longfisher]

Well, the "Texas Closure" is about to end, on Thursday the 15th.

For those of you who don't know what that is, the closure is the period of time during the spring and early summer months when the gulf waters of Texas are closed to shrimping so as to let the migrating shrimp grow to market size. It ends just about every year on or about July 15th.

What's that got to do with kingfish. Well, the kings are concentrated on structure before the closure ends and, thereafter, concentrated on the every mobil shimp fleet. Fishing for just about all pelagics common within 40 - 50 miles changes dramatically, as a result, as most of the high-producing structure is almost barren and fishing shifts to anchored boats, shrimp boat by catch slicks, weed lines or open ocean trolling.

My primary target is kings (just loves catchin' 'em) and they get a lot harder to locate in numbers after the closure. I've tried everthing, outriggers, downriggers, deep diving lures, surface and sub-surface lures trolled at various speeds. But I can't seem to have anywhere near the number of hits after the closure and I think my baits are just not attractive enough.

So, I chatted with a commercial guy at the Marina the other day and he said all the commercial king fishers use octopus rigs. Huh?

I take it he mean spreader bars. I've never tried one. So, I though I'd ask if anyone else has caught Gulf kings on them and also ask for advice on their setup and lures.

Oh, I hope this is the right forum.

LongFisher

[IglooMan]

LF,
Spreader bars and dredges DO catch Kingfish... Lots of em!

Check out this thread about a tournament winning Kingfish caught on a SuperBar Spider dredge (www.archersuperbars.com):

SuperBar Trinidad Tourney Win

If you have any questions please feel free to PM me.

Tight lines,
Chris Jones

[Robja]

We slow troll live baits for kings almost all the time up here. I know alot of the commercial guys will pull larger spoons when commercial fishing up here at faster speeds. I have never heard of the rig your talking about but I don't think it would work for us slow trolling since Kings tend to slice through the spread and I would think would collect anything like a spreader bar rig. A couple of years ago in November we got into a bunch of schoolie kings and limited out(3 per man) in 30 minutes with 5 on the boat.