Bait

Bait

Most of my current fishing does not involve bait, but that’s where I started, and I return to it as often as I need to, or choose to.  Bait fishing can be as relaxed or as precise as you’d like, and a good bait is always working for you.  Some have a sense that fishing with bait isn’t as sporting, or doesn’t take as much skill, as fishing with artificial lures or flies.  I’ll simply disagree; you can botch, or master, any technique to your own particular level.

Certainly fishing with Spam, cheese, dough-balls and worms qualifies as bait fishing, but I guess I’m generally thinking “finfish” when I say “bait”.  Given a lively finfish of the appropriate species and size, I’ll have confidence that I’ll get bitten by an appropriate gamefish.  Such live bait is not always available (or even the best choice), so I’ll resort to other baits when I need to.  But use of such bait just isn’t as exciting to me as presenting a livie, watching it react to the presence of the predator, and ultimately seeing the bait get engulfed by my quarry.  So given a choice, I’ll go with a finfish.

I really started fishing when my Dad introduced me to golden shiners.  To his credit, Dad enjoyed watching the float react to the shiner’s struggles as much as actually catching a bass.  He could be mesmerized by the float’s dance over calm waters, and on more than a couple of occasions, he chose this over more productive fishing in deeper, exposed waters.  As I grew up, that drove me nuts (especially when it involved Stafford’s Pond smallies!), but he really enjoyed his chosen style of fishing; that is, shiners under floats in calm water.

I'm not a finfish fanatic, though; I will resort to other baits.  My book knowledge of fishing was rapidly outpacing my actual experience on the water (my Stream Cred?) when I was young teenager.  But I once scored a warm summer’s day of wet-wading a pretty decent trout stream in southern Rhode Island when I was about 14.  I first became aware of the surprising number of trout present that day through my clumsy, hurried wading techniques; I saw dozens of legal trout fleeing my approach.  Once I got that aspect of my efforts under control, I was chagrined to find that the trout wanted nothing to do with my arsenal of lures, flies, and dead baits.  In desperation, I turned to my book learning; I started sifting the stream bed for invertebrates.  When I finally captured a hellgrammite, I lightly hooked it through the collar and made an upstream cast alongside a log shading some deeper water.  I was amazed when a lit-up rainbow charged out of the hole, followed by others, and engulfed the free-drifting nymph.  Shortly thereafter, I strung up my biggest ever (at that time) trout; all 15 inches of it.  So long as I could capture and present a hellgie or stonefly I was golden for the rest of the day.  This day fostered my life-long interest in aquatic ecology; and on a more practical level, it showed me the power of presenting what the fish want to eat.

Hellgrammite - from the Web!

You’d think that years later I would have gotten the message.  I took a family fishing trip to Canada; my youngest was only a few months old, and so we chose a convenient drive-to resort destination on a chain of lakes with actual Canadian residents living on the water.  So it was, by definition, a Canadian fishing vacation, but it wasn’t wilderness fishing; and while the fishing was OK, it wasn’t great.

Over the course of the week, the lodge owner re-iterated his faith in live bait.  He had various stories of Bass Pros who had visited the lake and had broken down, dropped their professional tournament techniques, and resorted to crawlers.  This fell on my deaf ears for most of the week; but later in the week, feeling the sands of vacation time running through the glass, I started drifting crawler harnesses.  My catch rate improved, the diversity of my catch increased and now included consistent walleyes and pike, the fish were bigger, and the fishing was just, simply better.  It still wasn’t fantastic, but it was pretty darn good for the last couple of days, when I relented to the use of bait.

(Let me defend my honor here and state for the record, that this week of fishing was plagued by strong mid-day winds.  Boat control became impossible (except for trolling), and I’d been smart enough to include my riggers, a couple of rigger rods and an assortment of trolling spoons for lake trout.  This mid-day trouting really iced my cake for the week, because I stayed on a consistent, quality bite all week.  In fact, I caught the largest laker of the year for the lodge.  At 10 or 12 pounds, it wasn’t the biggest ever, but I’d say that this, too, was pretty darn good; as was the feeling of bringing a couple of older gents aboard the boat (Mrs. Paul, at the time) and watching them catch a couple of lakers apiece.)

Now the only thing worse than paying for bait, is not purchasing enough; or chincing out and buying inferior bait rather than prime bait.  As an outsider, I’m told that live bait is pretty scarce in Palm Beach during the winter.  This coincides with the area’s best sailfishing of the year, and so bait is pricey.  Let’s say $100 -120 a dozen for goggle eyes (prime) or maybe $50 a dozen for blue runners (still expensive, but the choice for chinces.)   After a couple of trips where we nursed our bait supply through the day, or watched only the gogs get hit, for my last trip I decided to “go big.”  On the way out to the channel I authorized the purchase of 18 gogs; it was, in fact, a small expense in comparison to the effort and expense of actually getting on a boat in Florida at the right time.  It was simply insurance against another dud of a day.

So of course we set up in the thickest congregation of king mackerel I’ve ever seen, while still hoping for a sail.  Kings are very cool fish, and they provided some super surface strikes; but for the most part they were slashing our baits, missing hooks, and slicing mono.  It was a day of lots of action, and not so much catching, although I was pleased to catch a nice one off the kite (rigged with a wire leader, by the way.)  I mentally tallied the bill and the tilting odds with each missed strike; meanwhile I could tell from the radio that the bulk of the sails were 60 miles north.  A few days later, I was on those fish, but I’d simply traded a live bait bill for a hefty gas bill (we were trolling brined ballyhoo.)  There’s no free sailfishing experience!

King Mackerel off the kite!

Trolled Sailfish on!  In rough seas!

A favorite way of mine to fish is to work the Food Chain.  I love to catch my bait on hook and line; and then use it later that trip for the predator of choice.  So whether it’s maggot-smelt-lake trout; pimple-perch-pike; worm-bluegill-catfish; or Kastmaster-mackerel-striper, I get a kick out of climbing this ladder, especially in the same trip.  I’m always on the lookout for these opportunities, and the best part is, your bait is guaranteed fresh!  On the other hand, if you struggle to make bait, you’d better have a viable Plan B.

Smelt eat maggots; lakers eat smelt.

Stripers love the right size mackerel!

My striper fishing in Maine has become very bait-centric.  While I’ve tried to break my reliance on bait here, I’ve just had too many visible, outright refusals of my lures to warrant use of anything but live bait.  I can see the bass following the lures, but they won’t commit.  My water is extremely calm and quiet, and I guess the stripers are either on "High Alert" or can otherwise be choosie; but other than the occasional Kastmaster Surprise, lures just don’t seem to work (consistently) for stripers here.  At least not to my satisfaction.

My method of choice would be a live mackerel of appropriate size; but these can be scarce, and keeping more than one at a time in reserve on my dock is problematic.  Reliance on these baits could mean a lot of bait fishing (which is fun enough), but little striper fishing.  The sandworm is more consistent; but these require a trip to town, storage in the fridge, they’re fragile, they attract pesky herrings, etc.  Plus, they’re fairly fearsome creatures with internal chitenous jaws (visible only when threatened!) and slime.  But they are virtual Striper Candy, so I’ll put up with them; and they seem to work the best when other options are limited. But they still don’t offer that finfish dance, that frenzy that announces the appearance of the striper, the visible anticipation of the strike.  On the other hand, I’ve noticed that the take of one of these worms by a full-grown bass can be as dainty as a mackerel’s nibble, so you just never know what might be jiggling your float.

Sandworm!

I’ve caught one adult menhaden (pogie, bunker) on hook and line in Maine, and although it seemed way too big for my local stripers, I set it out under a float.  In very short order the bait exploded and line was zipping off my reel.  I fed as much line as I dared, given the moorings, pots, anchors and pier supports surrounding my fishing position.  I came tight, got a short run from an apparent sizeable bass, and the hook pulled.  But I could tell I still had my bait, and so I let it flutter in place; and before the bait settled down, it got taken again.  This time I got a better hook-set, but there was no stopping this striper; and I ended up breaking it off before it spooled me.  This was probably a mistake, because the line I saved was worthless from having rubbed a mooring, anyway.  But this brief encounter gave me an idea of the pogie’s power over bass.

This past summer I had the chance to snag some bunker on Narragansett Bay, and that was fun in its own right.  I had to acknowledge that I was using a snagging hook that would be illegal to possess in Michigan, but which was recognized as an indispensable tackle item in southern New England. The first bass of the day took a pogie right off my snagging hook and provided an excellent fight on the bunker tackle.  I thought that was a fluke until I caught a beautiful blue later on the day, when I purposefully dropped a snagged pogie down to a visible chasing bass.  Meanwhile, most of the bunker we dropped to the bottom of the bay that day got bit; unfortunately, mostly by one-bite blues.   This provided me a hint, however, in the allure of the pogie head for bass; the blues eat the meat and lose interest, while the bass eat the crumbs dropping through the water column.  I’ll remember this the next time blues are plaguing my baits. 

Bluefish are present!

This blue caught my treble-snagged pogie.

Bluefish are present!  I should drop this head down to the bottom for scavenging bass!

What’s this leading up to?  I’ll continue to make use of bait.  And one of my goals for the future goes something like this:

• Catch a mackerel on light tackle.
• Live-line the mack, on appropriate tackle, for a yellow-eyed demonic bluefish.
• Pop this blue in a livewell (preferably on my own boat) and find some likely Bluefin tuna habitat.
• Successfully deploy the blue and convert it into a tuna.

My biggest quandary is the deployment; simple live-lining?  Slow troll?  Off an outrigger?  Off a kite?

Until then, I’ll play with my worms, macks, shiners and dough-balls.