What type of spring bobber do you use?
For many years I have used a flat metal ribbon bobber made by HT. I modified the plastic keeper and metal ribbon to make an adjustable rod tip. Attachment 107353Attachment 107354
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What type of spring bobber do you use?
For many years I have used a flat metal ribbon bobber made by HT. I modified the plastic keeper and metal ribbon to make an adjustable rod tip. Attachment 107353Attachment 107354
Hi Bob, I use them too. I wrap sewing thread around the flat stock a bunch of times. Then I use my wifes clear polish (or whatever I can get away with) and put about 3 coats over the sewing thread. I don't use the little plastic thing. You can adjust the flat stock to whatever length you want. It works really good and stays in place. Just a thought...
I take a #8 guide wrap it to the rod end and use it with the st croix spring bobber. go to the hardware store and get a rubber grommet to fit the guide and spring. I have also made spring bobbers from stainless steel leader , looks just like a jason mitchell spring bobber but has only 1 leg and is more sensitive . just use a small bead on the end just like a jason mitchell rod.
For the past five years I have been also using a home made hybrid coil and wire whisker combo. These are very similar to the ones described above.Quote:
Originally Posted by gwk
The big difference is the wire whisker for added visibility and sensitivity. Also this type of mount add very little weight to the rod tip. Attachment 107422Attachment 107423
Bob, I sure do like the looks of that one.
OK, I am from the sunny south and have never ice fished. Are you guys using this rig because the bite is so light you can't feel it or see the rod tip move? I did not have a clue what it was until I read down in the thread some. :dono
SeaRay
They do hammer it quite abit. But more often than not we are equipped for the most sensative bites. I use spring bobbers but I also have ultra sensative rods where I dont use the bobbers. Heck, some guys still use small corks where I am located at. To each their own is what I always say.Quote:
Originally Posted by SeaRay
During the hard water season the fish are very lethargic due to the cold water. The bite can be very lite on some occasions. The springs do a great job detecting the lite bites and will out perform a float in most cases.Quote:
Originally Posted by SeaRay
In many cases the bead will not move more than a 1/16 of a inch either up or down. If the lite biters feel any resistance they reject and spit the lure.
X2 - With Bob/ MN on this. Will stick my neck out on this but I would say a spring bobber will in a full winter of ice fishing will out fish all other methods bar none !!!!!!!! Have a great winter season on the ice. STEVE
https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/248/9086...3_L1?$product$
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HT Enterprises Ice Blue Super Flex Ice Fishing Rod, 18"
Item # 419823
Customer Rating:
4.7
(3 reviews)
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Key Features
- Sensitive spring bobber-like rod tip
- One of the most sensitive rods available
- Corkalon handle and black rings
- E-Z Ice Out steel guides
Right here is the most fun rod I have ever used. No need for a bobber, the tip is very flexibale. If you get a 8" Bluegill on it, you'll think it's a whale...Lots of fun with this one...
Exactly. There are days when you can limit out on just that soft a bite and at times almost as quickly as you can get back down to the fish, plus a bobber no matter how small does not allow one to work one's offering. It just lays there. Sometimes that is good enough but not usually. Bluegills are notorious for the quick spit. Crappies hold a little longer, but also spit, if they feel too much resistance. There have been winters when I could count the total actual strikes for the whole season on the fingers of one hand, and we still iced hundreds of panfish.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob/MN
You get a musky, a pike, or a decent largemouth on one of those and you will be wishing for more backbone. We get the big eaters joining the panfish party every once in a while. They will take the tiny offerings directly, too.
This rod has a very similar ultraslow, ultrasoft action as the 22" lightest version of the Frabill Panfish Popper which comes with a spring bobber, although that is one of those terrible unadjustable coil spring jobbies. I fished one of those with the spring bobber removed for a couple of seasons and liked the very soft tip on it a whole lot. Then I broke it. The HT 24" Icelander noodle has very nearly that soft of a tip, but it has some backbone behind it farther down the blank. I use a couple of them rebuilt with cork handles and better guides. They work very well. You can also get that soft of a blank from Jann's netcraft and build your own and it will be very close to that soft and that slow, too. They also have everything else you would need including tips with the right size tube, I used single legged fly fishing guides to keep the weight down. That is still too slow for us; so I reenforce the butt with a proper sized piece of broken hollow ultralight out to about the first guide, epoxied in place. My fishing partner held a full sized musky on that for very close to 10 minutes a couple of winters back; so it will take it, when necessary.
I use the soft tipped rods both the purely ice ones and some longer all year around. The summer bite, especially for crappies, can be very nearly as soft around here, a whole lot of times. For tight in jigging the shorter, soft-tipped sticks do very well on open water, too.
Personally I do not like how flexible the corkalon handle is either, but that is just me.
The lakes I normally fish both summer and winter are heavily stocked with muskies and to me they are a plague. But native pike and largemouths show up almost as frequently and walleyes are relatively common around here in crappie fishing, especially late in the day.
I too enjoy using this rod. Put a reel on it with a good smooth drag and i can handle anything that bites. I've caught walleyes and steelhead as well as bass on mine. No musky or pike landed but have had a few bite offs as once that 3lb line touched their teeth, the fight is over. Probably would happen even with a jason mitchell rod. The HT is inexpensive but a very good ice rod. If i break one, and i have, i just order another. For their price, give them a try. They're a great ice shelter rod.Quote:
Originally Posted by Crappie 1
I have not seen this rod so far on the shelves yet.Quote:
Originally Posted by Crappie 1
Is this rod similar to a noodle stick?
Bob, I don't know if you have a Walmart around you. If you do they call these Ice Blue Rods. Blue/Orange tips. They come in several lengths. They are kinda like a Noodle Stick. We used ours this summer at night for Crappie, was sure fun...
You can also order them online from FishUSA.com - Fishing Tackle at America's Tackle Shop website.
http://www.fishusa.com/HT-Enterprise...ng-Rods_p.html
Around here Fleet Farm carries a big selection of HT ice tackle, including both the Icelander and the Ice Blue Super Flex. The names are labeled on the rod. Make sure you pick out just what you are looking for; HT makes quite a variety of bargain priced tackle, and some of it is pure junk. Fleet Farm here in the Metro (at least two locations) carries a very large selection of ice tackle at least in the beginning of the season.
There are a bunch of very nice, inexpensive noodle type rods out there this year that make springs almost a bother. Yet if you like the springs, a retro fit of a St. Croix panfish similar to the one showing the coil /whisker can be done easily. No1son and I are both familiar with a company that makes high end noodle rods that started at $65.00. Today those rods hold no trump to any of the noodle style rods that many companies make at 1/6th of the price. And you don't have to wait 6 months to get the rod in your hand.
You can also make your own noodle stick in exactly the style you want from the Jann's Netcraft Microlite blanks which work very well for all that they are a bare 3 bucks apiece and come in several lengths. They also have a special very light micro-tubbed tip at 2/64" that works on all of this type of rod, but has a larger loop that doesn't ice up nearly so bad as the real tiny opening ones that the commercial ones tend to have. I have replaced all the tips on all of my various noodle rods with them.
A couple of short evenings is all it takes to build one. A pleasant way to spend some spare time. I built mine on 4 guides on 24" finished length. That produces a very soft noodle rod, but to give it some backbone sheathing the butt out to about the first guide with a tightly fitted section from a broken hollow ultralight epoxied in place turns the trick on that. I used single legged fly guides to cut down on weight with a single legged relatively small spinning guide on the bottom. I like cork but corkalon also works for a handle. I have always gotten good service out of Jann's, too.
I have to say that I got a couple of those expensive rods, but since using them I found I don't need to spend that kind of money or anything close now that I know what kind of performance I want. The expensive models definitely do perform as advertised, make no mistake, but you don't have to shell out that kind of money for that level of performance either. I keep the components for a couple more rods around. Then all I need for replacement is to take the time to assemble them. The biggest part of the time needed is waiting for the epoxy to dry...
There is a certain amount of satisfaction in catching fish on a stick you made yourself, especially if it works like you meant it to in the first place.
I have to agree with you 100% and my fishing partner from his experience yesterday would have to agree also. I ended up catching all the fish on our first trip. We both were using the same lure,bait and line. The difference is he was using a noodle stick with a lite tip and I was using a medium action rod with a hybrid .016 spring bobber. He did detect some bites but missed the hook-ups. Needless to say he wants a spring set up on his rod.Quote:
Originally Posted by bassbull
I am convinced that there is not a noodle stick around the will detect a lite bite as well as a .010 or .016 SS wire spring bobber.
Now if I am going to do some pounding or spoon fishing then I will use a conventional tip,but when it comes to finesse fishing and a lite bite I will go with the spring every time.
One of the benefits to a noodle rod is the soft tip. True noodle rods load so slow in the tip at the hookset that the fish don't realize whats happening until too late. With springs you have to have really balanced combinations working or the rod, like in medium action loads to hard and sudden causing those misside hit even though the detection was there. If the spring is on a rod that's too soft in the tip you end up with a "double loading", first that spring and then the rod....also a source for missed hit. I have a couple rods that I retro fitted with spring of a couple designs and had a challenge to get things just right. The noodles go to work right out of the store so there are advanages of one over the other.
A few comments on lite bites, the spring bobbers actually help us detect a hit when the weight of the presentation is absent. The fish will inhale the jig and the spring bobber will unload signaling it is time to set the hook. On my lightest 2 lb set ups the added spring bobble helps to tone down the twitches some time to quiver the jig we will just tap the rod blank with our finger to get a reluctant fish to hit.
As far as the Ice Blue Rods, I have at least a dozen or so in various lengths, while the tips are light , they do have plenty of backbone in the butt section to handle larger fish such as bass and the occasional pike. No ice last season , so I only lurked here. Hopefully we will be able to walk on water a bit in another month or so. Got out for some cold water scouting and located a few more holing areas for the slabs, nothing over 14" but the results were promising.
Proof
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aqD-_uqa2E
Springs will help some with the up-ward hits. Many of these newer noodle rods will show the same, maybe not quite as exaggerated as a spring, with most jigs except for the ultra light ones and those are tough to use in deep water scenarios.
Springs or good noodle tips either one will show the up-bite. Noodle rods with unbalanced outsized guides often won't show anything, they just keep yo-yoing. That kind of noodle rod is trash. Up bite happens all year around and it can be handled either way as deep as 20' and maybe deeper with 64th oz jigs, but you need to fish the lightest lines to make that work; so that you get a good straight line tightening. The real key is equipment properly balanced to allow the best monitoring of the light bite, and a whole lot of that will be visual. You don't need any help detecting the real strikes, but those will be far and away the minority of the crappie bite in the winter (actually in summer, too).
CTom:Quote:
Originally Posted by CTom
I think you missed my point. Since we were fishing a valley period between a minor and major feeding period. The bite was extremely lite with the fish being in a neural feeding mode.
The problem was not getting a hook set but detecting the lite bite.
I could see the lite bites on the hybrid spring quite easily and my partner had problems seeing the bite on the noodle. One thing to remember the tip on a noodle is .032 where a wire spring is .010 to .015, twice to three times smaller in diameter.
With reference to loading on a medium action rod. A hybrid spring with a coil folds over quite easily. Using a quick snap hook set with a flick of the wrist usually ends up in a hook-up and takes loading out of the picture. I can see if a stiff wire spring is used loading could be a problem.
I have both type of rods and the both have there benefits.
That is some good stuff all the way around fellas. Very informative reading.
Bob...
Are these springs, the hybrids, an after-market affair or one thats commercially available?
They sound interesting. Thanks for the clarification.
The hybrids are home made. I believe st croix makes a similar bobber.Quote:
Originally Posted by CTom
For years I used the HT ribbon but I wanted a indicator that is always well above the rod tip. Mainly for ease of viewing. So six years ago I came up with the coil/whisker combo. The first versions were glued to the rod tip; two years ago I came up with a detachable version.
It really is a simple system: Tack-L-tool is used to make the spring,some shrink tubing,silicon tubing,floss,SS wire, rod varnish, some time and you have a custom hybrid spring bobber. Then let your imagination run wild,a short whisker ,long whisker,end loop size large or small, bead type/size, color,glow,red or what ever fits your fishing needs.
The rods that I use from a local guy have a spring bobber already on them. They are mounted right above the top eye. I go through the last eye and then through a loop in the spring. The bobbers also screw off.
Sounds much like a St. Croix spring. I have a pile of those in the closet that I got to retro-fit rods with the top-side guide and grommet. The St.Croix is a nice spring that up-ward hits can't get around. I also have a bunch of the Thorne springs made for panfish, but the line runs thru the spring body and on open ice in the cold they ice shut. I a warm shack they are fine and for a barrel spring type of strike indicator they are something else....super sensitive and they show those up-ward hits really well.
There are so many opinions flying around about strike detection that its hard to stay abreast of the innovations and impossible to make everyone happy with one idea. I guess this is what drives tackle creation and the ice fishing industry itself. Great stuff.
I have always gone by the quote" necessity is the mother of invention" If something doesn't work to my liking or need I will redo it or come up with something that works.Quote:
Originally Posted by CTom
There are many variations of spring bobbers.
The barrel spring has been around for quite a while. The first models were ball point pen springs taped to the ice rods. Like you pointed out they would freeze up and were a bummer to thread.
I have a friend who still uses the ball point spring and made him a threader.( bottom item of the spring pictures)
None of this stuff is rocket science just plane common sense. :-)Attachment 109331
Bob, I would say they look pretty darn good.
Ditto.Quote:
Originally Posted by Crappie 1
Those look good to me too. Both thought and experience went into making those.
What we all have in common here, is fishing the light bite. I do that year around anyway. I sorta gotta suspect that spring bobbers would increase a lot of folks open water catch, too. The highly sensitive rod tips have saved the day for me a lot of times.
Most of my crappie take comes from pretty much straight down, generally not more than ten to 15' off vertical even in summer; winter presentations work just fine year around. Even in a boat, I troll or drift to make contact and then hover over the school for the bulk of the take.
I fish the Minneapolis Park waters real heavy in all seasons. Half a dozen decent lakes within a few minutes drive on all sides of me and the river behind. Hard to launch a boat on one of those waters and I don't have one anyway nor a vehicle able to tow with either nor enough of a lot to park it in for that matter.
In winter those waters are all walk-on with no permanent shacks or any kind of vehicle allowed. All shanks' mare. So I don't do all that much running and gunning either. That's more a sport for younger men and those with the hauling capacity and legal ability to be much more mobile on the ice than is available for me, at least on the waters I prefer.
I don't use spring bobbers because they are just another delicate item to snag when the kit comes out of the back seat of my little car. (I will never buy another two door!) So I live on my soft tips with the flasher being another set of eyes in winter anyway. I have not yet started to use the flasher on the docks, but I think that would probably help there, too. I have modified all my rods, except the Mitchell Meat stick to larger but still light weight eyes using single legged fly guides. They usually tend to come with ones so small that they ice up too easily or are just too heavy for the action.
Since I fish in the open, I keep my kit as simple and as light as possible. In the winter my thumbs ache, if I do not keep them warm; so I rig up in the house and keep my car rods rigged. Tying knots in the cold simply doesn't work very well for me, and I suffer for it when I am not fishing. In the house I use magnification for tying the fine winter lines anyway.
Necessity is certainly the mother of invention, no where as obviously as fishing the hard water. Gotta love this sport.
In the end crappie fishing is still the light bite. Ignore it and you do need to put out a dozen rods to take your limits, and then only maybe. Spring bobbers are a very good approach, but don't quite fit my conditions.
Right after ice out and late fall until the harbors freeze over is when I do a lot of dock fishing. Why fiddle with the boat when you can drop a line straight down at your feet? Over the years I have found favor in shorter long rods and have indeed found a couple St. Croixs in 4.5 foot UL. I added the extra guide atop of the tip guide of each of these rods and have a St. Croix spring in each. One rod carrys 2 pound Vanish the other carries two pound Nanofil. The one with naon sees the use of heavier jigs and the spring is adjusted for those while the other gets used for lighter stuff and the spring is adjusted to reflect those light weights. I do like banging some heavier jigging spoons with full-sized plastics when the crappies tell me that they're willing to play hard and in those instances I simply re-rig, running the lines thru the conventional factory guides and jig away. On active fish like this springs are a joke and don't help at all....the hits are just crazy hard. Some of these spoons will weigh up to 1/8 ounce.Quote:
Originally Posted by no1son
On the same couple of rods I have better luck on the springs when the water temps have dropped into the 40 degree range and I am targeting sunfish. Sunfish seem to have more radical mood swings than crappies and when they get in a funk I agree whole heartedly with the spring idiology. Sunfish can downright miserable to fish for after a cold front in cold water and the larger they get the harder they are to convince into hitting at times. For me springs have a place and a time all their own. One of the key aspects here is that the fish live in an environment entirely different from ours and they really don't know the different between open water and ice except for the water temp and how it plays on their metabolism. I am one who likes to go to the water well prepared but not having to carry the infamous kitchen sink. I have springs in with my summer tackle that can be added in a blink to my long rods should I ever find the need to use one at the time.
As a rule fishing in the winter stands as such with me.....if I have to slow things down to where I use a spring to see an upwards hit, I go home. The fish simply are not working fast enough to hold my attention. Noodles and somewhat stiffer rods are used more by me thru the winter for this reason. Like Dale, I have too many joints that don't want to function smoothly in the cold but when the mood hits me I still will have springs, noodles, and slightly heavier rods for my jigging.
CT,
Just because they are biting soft doesn't necessarily mean they are biting slow. It just means they are not willing to chase. That is when being right on the spot can take fish after fish on slackline and upbite takes, when you get the size and the color right. To me that says they are grazing on forage that cannot or generally does not flee, generally forage than is probably concentrated and not moving much nor capable of it, either.
When we started noticing that much larger bonus fish were not taking the tiny offerings any harder than the crappies, we started to to think that our quarry was actually adjusting intensity of take to what their forage at the time required. Like other predators they are not very likely to put out any more effort than necessary.
For the most part we do not know what will take out crappie offerings next, nor what size it will be until we set the hook, except that it is more likely to be crappies than anything else, since that is what we are targeting.
I fish the soft bite pretty hard, since that is the usual case I find myself fishing to all year around. If a dock holds crappies, it will generally have some sort of soft bite going some place along it pretty much as long as it is installed, with winter spots somewhere close by and very often close to spawning areas, too. We don't take many white crappies up here; they rove more over wider spaces than the blacks. Granted the blacks move around too, but are much more home bodies in areas that have what it takes draw them in the first place, more often moving up and down specific breaklines than moving over wide general areas.
The difference in observations can be wide Dutch. The waters we fish can also show a great degree of diffenerences in fish behavior. I'm either on the Zumbro or I'm on the Mississippi if I am ice fishing. On both waters I have areas that historically producer the larger, way more agressive feeding fish...that's where I fish. If the fish aren't in these locales, I go home. I won't waste time trying to entice medium to potato chip sized fish into hitting. That isn't fun to me. I'd rather catch four 14" crappies in a couple hours than thirty dinks an hour. And when these spots have fish on them, the fish are feeding hard and hit like trucks. On a locator they show up as a blip for about a second...they are aggressive and on the move. Most of these crappies will have small sunfish in their guts so they aren't doing the micro diet stuff. If I can get bit without the springs, thats how I prefer to get the job done. A very small minnow/plain hook with a micro-splitshot keeping it down can be deadly on crappies if they are getting fussy on a spring, but I don't see that happen often at all. If they'll take a swipe at a 1/8 jigging spoon with a 2" plastic hanging on it they certainly aren't hitting light.
I know you spend most of your time inside the metro and those lakes, given the amount of fishing pressure they see, can produce fish that have a real knack for light bites. I'm not denying that you run into that scenario up there. I just don't see it here because I am fishing water that doesn't see the pressure and the waters here are entirely different in make up from those you are on. The Zumbro has an inordinate amount of deep water with severely dropping shorelines. I don't fish on water any shallower than 28 feet, but I seldom have the line down more than 12'. One of my pet spots on the river has 33 feet where I fish and I hardly ever get below 18 feet there. Are there fish on the bottom in these places? You bet, tons of them. At times the bottom 4 feet will literally be moving with fish. Those fish aren't the ones that are feeding and cameras have shown big crappies right on the bottom with all of the other sizes. Put a bait down there and those large fisgh simply cannot be coaxed into hitting. Get that camera up in the mid column depths and you'll see crappies on the prowl but you'd better look quick because they are not just inching along. Every water produces its own style of bite, of that I am certain.
I've done that "slight angle change in the wire" type of bite before and I haven't the need to fiddle with those fish.
I got a couple of what is called the Big Eye spring bobbers yesterday. I never bought this kind before. Their kind of long, might have to shorten them up some. Also the Son gat me an under water camera. It's an Outdoor Vision System-VS 400 It belonged to his boss, who sold his house, and was going to throw it out, so the kid grabbed it for me. It set in the guy's basement for 4 years, hardly ever used. Good deal for me.. Got the charger & all, can't wait to try it out.
Those cameras can be great education. I almost bought one a couple years back, but then I decided to start stepping away from the ice fishing a bit.
As pointed out on a previous post the springs do a good job detecting lite bites and up bites. We have found out that when fishing for crappies a good % of the bites are a up bites. It seems like the bigger the fish the lighter the bite. There are exceptions when the fish are actively feeding and just about jerk the rod out of your hand. Unfortunately the active period is usually very short and we have to contend with the lite bite.
When the crappies and gills are running together It is fun the be able to predict the type of fish hooked before the fish is iced. Up bite crappie, down bite gill.
One other virtue of the spring is fishing with live bait. If the fish are mouthing and running with the bait you can follow the line down without being detected by the fish. This gives you a inch or two of wiggle room to work with.
One concern was storage of the spring when transporting the rods. With the HT spring system the spring is slid back to the rod tip. With the hybrid system the spring is removed from the front of the keeper and inserted into back of the keeper. With both systems the line is still threaded through the spring and the lure hooked to a keeper on the rod. With this type of a storage system the springs will not get a set in them.