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Straight from our catalog. Sorry, but picts omitted, except for the ones below...
ARE YOU SURE THAT YOU WANT TO KEEP FISHING THAT STINGER OR WHISKEY LINE? I DON'T!
You catch fish on your stinger, right? So why ask this seemingly silly question? The photo clearly shows “where the action is” when a school of feeders comes in and attacks a meatball of bait. In this case the stinger lure would be way back there with the stragglers – fish that obviously aren’t hot and feeding in the first place, so why put a bar, lure back or bait back there? Second, if you do get hooked up (and that ain't as easy on long, long mono line than it is on short - especially for billfish) that fish is much further away from the boat and you are giving it a running start that none of the other fish that you have hooked up in “The Action Zone” get. And would that stinger lure get bit if it was in among the others, where the real action is happening? You’re kidding, of course! The chances are, though, that none of the fish lagging behind the school are feeders and that long lure isn’t going to get bit many times on this sort of stop.
YEAH, BUT WHAT ABOUT THOSE TIMES WHEN THE STINGER GETS BIT?
Here’s what...YOU HAVE ALMOST CERTAINLY MISSED GETTING A MULTIPLE HOOKUP, THAT’S WHAT! Remember that tuna (and most other gamefish) travel in schools. If the fish are the right kind and in a feeding mood, or if you are trolling the right kind of lure back there to turn non-feeders on, the very first fish to strike is going to be one of the school leaders at the front. WHEN YOU HOOK THAT FISH, IT BEATS FEET, TAKES OFF AND THE REST OF THE SCHOOL DOES WHAT COMES NATURALLY AND FOLLOWS IT...AWAY, NOT UP TO YOUR FULL SPREAD! If you are typical (like we were), you happily fight and land or lose ONE fish out of the seven or eight that you don’t realize that you probably would have caught if you hadn’t been trolling that single lure way back there in the back forty and that school ran off with the hooked fish! Sorry to all of you stinger fans out there, but this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and if it happens on an otherwise slow day it can and probably will mean a one fish day versus six, seven, or eight or even more.
HOW CAPTAIN FRED DISCOVERED THIS..."LOOKA THAT! DAMN!
“I used to love fishing a stinger and still do on occasion, but I never fish it way back where I used to – except for a special situation that I will explain in a bit - because of what was discussed above. One of the advantages of a tuna tower and one of many reasons why I wouldn’t have a boat without one is the incredible view of the spread and what happens in it one gets from way up there. You can watch the lures work and if you are really watching, see just about every fish or school of them that comes to your spread and see for yourself exactly how they react and hit. It was as common as daylight on my boat to hear me or one of the crew up in the tower bellow out, “Coming! Coming!”, followed by, “Tunas!”, “Big Tunas!”, “Dorado!”, “Marlin!”, “vela (Sail)!”, or “Wah(by the time we got the “hoo!” part out there was usually a reel or reels screaming. God I love those things!)
It used to drive most of our customers nuts when whoever was watching the pattern started that, “Coming! Coming!” stuff, especially when we had spotted fish way back there coming up the wake, which is where most tuna and marlin come from – behind or behind and below, with the main exception being dorado and wahoo, which can come in from anywhere. Sometimes it took the fish pretty long to get up and into the pattern and by then the two of us up in the tower would be yelling things like, “Oh yes, here they come! Tunas! Oh man, grandes!”, or “look at ‘em all!” “Get ready! Coming, coming, coming...passengers would start yelling up stuff like, "What fish?" "Where are they?" "You're jok...Pow! Rrright riggah! Pow! Left riggah! Pow, pow, pow, pow! There go the flats! Hooka, hooka, hooka!” (If you don’t freak out when you get covered by a school of tuna that you have watched come in from way back there, don’t fish with us! Hell, I’m shaking just writing this!)
TOWER TEACHINGS
It was during my early days down in Cabo, where I fished almost every day, year-round and where yellowfin tuna are a year-round target that I saw what happened and happened a lot when we trolled a long stinger, bar, bait, or lure. The first time should have been all that it should have taken, but we kept dragging the long bait for a few more days, I guess because we didn’t want to believe that what we saw wasn’t a fluke before ditching the stinger we’d used and caught fish off of forever -one at a time..
That first time was when we had a big school of big tunas coming in on top, hell-bent up the wake. It was tide change time and the fish were racing each toward us and our lures when the lead fish attacked the stinger lure, got hooked up and we watched it take off to the right, with the rest of the school speeding off with him! I didn’t make the logical connection on that one, but what happened was so clear and easy to see that it stuck in my mind like a jagged piece of glass.
Hoping that what happened with those tuna wasn’t a common thing, I quit driving for the next few days and just stood up in the tower, looking at the long lure and behind it. And damned if it didn’t happen again! And again! When the stinger shortstopped a pod of a dozen lit up striped marlin (they are school fish and multiples are common if you know what you’re doing), I yanked it and we quit fishing with the damned thing. As it has been with a few other things that I had done for years and thought were good, but it turned out weren’t, I got a sick thinking about all of the times that this had happened in the past and on a slow day that one stinger fish had cost us the kind of multiple bites that we all fish for and that as a charter captain, I counted on to catch four-to-six anglers a bunch of fish during a nine hour day.
Bear in mind that the fish only see the water – not the boat or sky above. My “sky lab”. A priceless classroom!
DON'T EVEN TRY!
No one will ever convince me that stingers are worth a damn and that they don’t cost you a lot of fish, especially tunas and smaller billfish; I have seen it with my own two eyes, over and over again. And what follows still convinces me that stingers cost you far more fish than they catch for you.
THE ONLY REASON I CAN THINK OF FOR A WWB
There were times down in Cabo when the tuna fishing simply got too good and the multiple hookups that are the norm for us were too much for our customers and they were getting beaten up big time. The limit is five per boat, so it was a rare day when we didn’t limit on them and wound up releasing a lot of fish. But this was Cabo and we prided ourselves on the numbers of billfish and other species that we caught regularly and if we beat up our customers too badly on the tunas, they might want to call it a day and in our case, that was a bad, not a good thing.
That’s when the stinger goes back out. The reason? because it didshortstop pods of tunas from coming up the wake and into the full pattern and covering our poor customers up again.. We still got covered once in a while by fish that came up directly under the lures, but the stinger cut way down on the tuna multiples and let us try to finish out the day with some of the other glory species. So I still fish the stinger once in a while, but not for the same reason that other fishermen do. I know that it is traditional fishing heresy and a lot of fishermen aren’t going to agree with me, but I strongly suggest you quit missing out on multiples because of that stinger too. Either that or run it no longer than your long rigger lures.
And finally, take a good look at those feeding tunas and start packing The Zone with SuperBars. Hooka, hooka, hooka!"
That's it for the quote. Our over one hundred catalog pages are loaded with information like this. The new one will be out in a couple of days.
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Originally Posted by Wild Life Management
