Thread: Summertime

Watched the video Mr. Baker posted on the site. Simplest Way To Longline. He seems to really enjoy taking us along for the trip. Any old ways he was using a bait that I had not seen before. Fin Spin Pro Series.

It is a Fin Spin design but with some flash tied on it and then a plastic bait slid on. He seemed to like them so I thought I would try my hand at fabricating my own.




and here is the Fin Spin Pro Series……what mine is supposed to look like.





I would say it needs some different materials. LOL


I was doing something similar inserting rubber legs thru the sides of plastic baits.










Maybe I need to revisit things. Many of the designs that work for slip bobber and casting and such might not be the best choice for trolling operations.

Still waiting on my mold from FatBoys Fishing- Big Eye Minnow. I always get antsy when I order something and it takes more than 2 days to get to me. Of course I will be pouring up a bunch and filing and painting and adding eyeballs. I seriously doubt that the new design will seriously increase my catches, but that is OK. I wanted a cleaner jig coming out of the mold and I like eyes, so…… it makes sense to get it. The Do-It molds leave a lot of slop.

I am hoping that the head will wobble some as it gets dragged through the murky depths. Who knows if it will ? I like to study my baits as they get trolled along behind the boat. Watch what they do. Not all of them behave as you imagine them to. Or rather as I imagine them to. That is how I learned about attitude of under spins when the head is too small and the blade too big. They assume a nose down attitude and you lose any semblance to a live minnow. Minnows will go nose down but not while swimming in a horizontal fashion. Only when diving.

I have looked at Chatter baits and wondered if there is something there for me to discover. Maybe a jig that swims upwards them downwards as it goes. Porpoising sort of. Crappie might see it and think it is trying to escape and give a reaction bite. Which is what I think they do with our brightly colored lures. They see it and figure to grab it and if it isn’t any good they can always spit it back out. We see this behavior in aquarium fish. They suck up the colorful pebbles on the bottom and spit them back out. Tasting them I imagine. Maybe the texture is all wrong. Maybe they are just bored to tears.

My local fish eat a lot of grass shrimp and bugs and such. Lake Fly Larvae make up a huge amount of their normal diet. We has shoals of shad cruising along filtering the algae, too. Then there are the Bull Headed Minnows, and the game fish fry. So they eat a lot of different shaped creatures. Maybe it is a complete waste of time to try to mimic anything. Just make something totally crazy and swim it by them.