Once a week water temperatures at Bogue Pier each Saturday from November 1995 through January 2015.

New Year’s Angling Resolutions for 2015.

As we rapidly approach the New Year on January 1. 2015, or if you are a procrastinator , the Lunar New Year 4712, Year of the Goat, on February 19, 2015, I would like to make some suggestions to make this year of angling that is more fish friendly, eco-friendly, fellow angler friendly and more productive and fun.

So repeat after me, I resolve the following…

Starting with fish friendly, please keep up-to-date with the moving target that are the fishing regulations here in the old North State. Regulations concerning the offshore bottom fish like sea bass, grouper and snapper are constantly in flux, so it’s best to check the NCDMF website from time-to-time, or better, subscribe to their proclamation updates, they are free and convenient. Some other species to watch closely are speckled trout, black drum and flounder; and remember bag limits are per person per day NOT per outing. No doubling or tripling up on your bag limits, and remember my creed for size limits, measure twice, fillet once, like a good carpenter. Also along the lines of fish friendly, I eat plenty of fish but I also catch and release fish with minimal handling and also release alive so called “trash” fish.  If you see violations call the NCDMF at 800.682.2632 for both recreational and commercial infractions.

Aside from fishermen abusing the regs, my next pet peeve is trash; bottles, cans wrappers and of course discarded fishing line. Many marinas and fishing piers have fishing line recycling bins. If you are not close to any, roll your line up and discard it later in a responsible manner. There is so much discarded line out there making a hazard to sea turtles, dolphins, water fowl and other critters, and mono fishing line has a lifetime of around 600-years. Braided line is probably even longer.

Anyone who has fished in close quarters, at the Lookout Jetty, on a fishing pier, along the banks of one of our local creeks or in a fall “trout Line” looking for speckled trout, knows that some people are user friendly and some are not. Respect other fishermen, do unto others; need I say more?

Now it’s time to resolve to be more productive. Remember that 20-percent of the anglers bring home 80-percent of the fish. Do you want to be one of the 20-percent?

Here are some tips. Read my lips…use the freshest or livliest baits only, not re-re-refrozen shrimp or something that has been sun dried and now resembling bait jerky.

Now for artificials, my newest favorite baits are 17-MR MirrOLures, so called Vudu Shrimp and Billy Bay Halo Shad.  If you haven’t tried them it’s time. In the same vein, maybe it’s time to try new lures. By try I don’t mean for a few casts then revert to your tried and true baits. See how they move wiggle and shake in the water at various retrieve speeds. How fast do they sink? By the way the 17-MR baits sink, but slowly. In fact I measured the drop rate at 10-seconds for a drop of 6-feet. Working new baits, learning new baits will lead you to more go-to baits that you have confidence in for catching fish. Remember, if you haven’t used it, it’s new to you! Do you feel comfortable with using corks? Top-water baits? Every year there are many new alluring baits on the market and I know they keep getting more expensive, but many of them really work if you give them an real chance.

How about some hands on action? Try tying your own flies, make your own tandem fly- teaser rigs or even consider building your own fishing rods. Catching with your own handy work makes fishing even more fun.

What are some of the top preventable reasons for LOF, loss of fish! How about dull and/or rusty hooks, old damaged and weak fishing line and the dreaded knot failure from poorly tied knots. Sounds like a resolution in the making here…”I resolve to replace rusty hooks and replace or sharpen dull hooks.” Dull and rusty hooks are one of the prime reasons for poor hook-ups, hook-ups that not secure and pull out and are easily remedied. How do you know if a hook is dull? Take the point of a hook and drag across your thumb nail. If it slides it’s dull, if it grabs and sticks into the nail it’s a sharp  point.

I often get the question, “Doc, I’ve had this line on my reel for several years, but I haven’t used it much, do I need to re-spool with new line?” I replace my line in the spring and fall and another time my spool gets thin, since I retie my leader knots often and cut off frayed line frequently. Remember the line is the only think between you and your trophy fish. I also use line conditioners to preserve my line. So is it time to replace your line?

Knots, you should never lose a fish due to knot failure. You don’t need to know many knots, but the ones you do know and use you need to do well. What do you need knots to do? For the light tackle, inshore or onshore angler you primarily need to tie a length of leader to your main line, make a loop and tie on terminal tackle. When I give my fishing lessons I teach three knots which all have the same origins, the overhand or granny knot.  To tie on my fluorocarbon leader to my braided line I use a surgeon’s knot. It starts with that dreaded over hand knot but if you go through twice, thrice or four times through voila you have a two, three or four turn surgeon’s knot. Twice through is fine with is you are tying the leader to mono, but I use four turns to braided line. It’s a great knot and works with mismatched line diameters. I can readily tie 20- or 25-pound fluorocarbon to 10-pound PowerPro braided line.  Many prefer uni- to uni- combo, but the surgeon’s knot is easier for me.  For making a loop for a sinker or any other loop, I teach the surgeon’s loop. It’s the same as a surgeon’s knot but you fold over your line and make a loop and tie it off with one granny know and another turn to make two  turns. A nice strong loop. Now for tying terminal tackle, I go with a Palomar knot. You start off like a surgeon’s loop but hang your snap, swivel or hook on the loop, make your granny know and then place the loop over the snap, swivel, hook or whatever.  It’s a 95% strength knot and since you put a loop through your tackle, you have double the strength with two lines going through your tackle.

I also use some more specialty knots for making tandem teaser rigs, like the dropper loop, or loop knots to tie on to lures or jigs as well. To see these and other knots Google them for animated versions of the knots or check out You Tube for demos.  Here is one of the animated knot websites, http://www.animatedknots.com/indexfishing.php.

If 20-percent of the fishermen catch 80-percent of the fish, a corollary is that 80-percent of the people fish in 20-percent of the known fishing holes, so maybe it’s time to break from the madding crowd, time to go off the beaten path and find your own honey holes. It will take some time and persistence, but can pay off is bigger better and less crowded catching. One way to do that is take up kayak fishing, you can go where most others can’t’ even think of going and the fishing pressure is less.

Another way to increasing your catching success, is to resolve to target the fish YOU want to catch. Each time you go out to the pier, the surf, on your boat of kayak, go out with a catch plan. For example, if you want to catch flounder. Pick the location, the structure, the tide, the current, the time of day and the live and artificial baits that will increase your likelihood of finding flounder for dinner. Of course sometimes you may get a redfish or trout as by-catch, but that’s okay. But what you will find is that your catch of your target species for that day will get better. I always go out of the house with a plan. But of course if things aren’t working out feel free to make a new plan for that trip.

Another way of gaining the knowledge of others is to join one of our local fishing clubs, they hold a wealth of knowledge, with friendly anglers willing to share. This year, resolve to join one of the local clubs. They include the Onslow Bay Saltwater Fishing Club, Saltwater Light Tackle Fishing Club and the Cape Lookout Fly Fishers. Similarly, this off season there will be a plethora of fishing seminars to be had and can provide a wealth of local fishing knowledge. Never stop learning. Fishing is more than luck. Lotteries are random dumb luck, not catching fish. To quote Branch Rickey, and John Milton before him, “luck is the residue of preparation”, so in 2015 be better prepared and be prepared to do more catching.

p.s. Time to resolve to be persistent in the New Year, it covers a lot of flaws, I know!

Surf at Bogue Pier ranged from a high of 66 to a low of 54-degrees with an  average of 60.2, (blue diamonds). Bogue Sound (red squares) had a high of 64 and a low of 44-degrees with an average of 54.9-degrees. November was a cooling off month.

Fishing the surf and pier and backwaters with artificial baits, from the Top Down by Dr. Bogus

While fishing the surf or from a pier or in a boat you can “scout” around looking for fish, but remember the fish don’t only distribute themselves (feeding or traveling) horizontally (laterally)  from place-to-place but also vertically within the water column…from the top down…the top, the bottom and everything in-between.

Let’s start on the top with top-water baits. These lures are visually the most fun way to get a feeding strike from a fish, especially those baits with that walk-the-dog Zig-Zag motion across the surface, and driving the fish crazy.  Even the names are catchy and inspirational like Top Dog (and its variants, Top Dog Jr., She Dog) , Zara Spook, Badonkadonk, Skitter Walk, there are others. There are other top-water baits like poppers (Popa Dog) and pencils,  that float or sink (to avoid birds picking them up) and push and splash water creating a ruckus like a fleeing baitfish on the surface, often noted by lurking hungry fish.

 What hungry fish? Stripers, blues, Spanish, red drum, speckled trout are my main targets. One of my favorite once-in-a-lifetime epic days, me and two of my fishing buddies caught and released nearly 60-red drum on MirrOlure Top Dogs in the fall North Carolina surf. It was magical, especially realizing that the puppy drum have inferior mouths, that is downward facing mouths, typical of bottom feeders. Yet they were swarming fighting for the privilege. Of course nothing beats stripers or gator blues on top-water.

When working these baits, try varying the speed and intensity of your retrieves to see what elicits a strike. And if you get a miss, DON’T stop, keep your bait moving. I have had many fish hit a surface plug multiple times and/or other fish join in the action, so keep the bait twitching and moving.

Now for the middle of the roaders, the so-called suspenders (not just for grandpa anymore) for working the middle of the water column. A few years ago I was at a fishing club meeting where Don Willis (Custom Marine Fabrication, New Bern, NC) was the guest speaker talking about new fishing tackle and gear he saw at the recent manufacturers’ tackle trade show in Raleigh, NC. He showed us some cool stuff, and also made an observation that I think was right on. He said “Berkley Gulp! and suspending baits have turned mediocre and poor trout fishermen to good trout fishermen.” Just think about it, anyone can almost catch just about anything on the Gulp! flavored baits, and suspending hard plastics baits are recent proven killers of trout, drum, stripers, blues and you name it. Particularly, the suspending baits, like MirrOlure Catch 2000, or their 17 and 27-MR series are also equally deadly. You throw them out and let them sink (they don’t really suspend, they sink slowly), add a few twitches and during the pause and drop-down “sleep phase”, and they are nailed by hungry, aggressive fish, spring, summer, fall and these slow moving baits are even deadly in the winter for even sluggishly cold fish.

Some of the original suspending baits were designed and made by Paul Brown way back in 1974, the “corkies”. These were soft plastic mimics of hard plastic or wooden baits of the time, with cork in the interior to adjust the buoyancy to float or sink slowly, and were known dubbed as Gumbys with fins. Today these baits are still available with some new twists including “corkie” (i.e., Soft-Dine) versions of the popular 17-MR MirrOlures that are great imitations of small shad or peanut bunkers. They also come in smaller (14-MR) and larger sizes (27-MR, Catch-5) as menhaden imitations as well finger mullet imitations such as 20-MR, the 22MR Catch 2000 Jr. and Catch 2000. By the way, the 17-MR MirrOlure so called suspending bait actually sinks at a rate of about 6-feet in 10 seconds, I measured it.

Suspending baits, that is slow sinking near neutrally buoyant baits, are one way to attack the middle depths between top and bottom, but lightly weighted (1/16, 1/8-oz. lead heads) or unweighted flavored and/or soft plastics baits are another approach. There is however some finesse when fishing these baits. These and other soft plastics are also excellent producers fished on the ultimate of suspending baits, the cork where you have total control of the movement and motion of the bait. If you fish these often you will quickly notice that most of the hits occur in the settling and drop down phase, when nothing is seemingly happening. So fish both the corked and uncorked baits slowly and only twitch the baits from time-to-time. Ditto with the suspenders, and I don’t mean the ones that hold up your pants. Cast, let the current or wind drift the bait when possible, occasionally twitching the bait. Again in the “sleep” phase is when you should expect the hit, bite or bump, so be ready or you may miss the fish. And by the way, these suspending baits, corked or not, especially in cold water, are best fished with a non-stretch braided or low stretch fishing line with a fluorocarbon leader.

Now we need to go down the ladder and attack the bottom rung of the water column where the bottom dwellers live and feed. First are the lipped and sinking hard plastic stick baits. MirrOlure’s traditional 52M and TT baits and their newer fancier Series III versions of these baits, along with YoZuri’s Crystal Minnows, Rapala’s X-Rap and the classic, not just for freshwater, the saltwater Rat-L-Trap. There are many others. The lipless baits are cast, sink and twitch and retrieve baits with your twitching providing the life like motion of an injured bait fish. Frequently I get hits on the way down, so I always let the bait get to the bottom before I twitch and retrieve.

The lipped baits are pre-programed to do their thing, to imitate an edible bait fish, so mostly I just crank it at various speeds. As always it is good to put your bait, lipped or not, through its paces. See how fast it sinks, see how it moves when you twitch it or during a steady retrieve, crank it fast crank it slowly and see if the bait vibrates or wobbles, even many non-lipped baits vibrate at certain retrieve rates. So know thy bait!

Now for some of my favorite lures, the heavy metals. This family of versatile baits can be made to imitate nearly any baitfish out there and catch nearly any predatory fish. Everything from slim sand eel and Atlantic silverside and bay anchovy jigs, diamond jigs and Deadly Dick lures to wider profile spoons like the Crippled Herring, Krocodile, Hopkins and Hopkins Shorty, the Johnson Silver Minnow Weedless Spoon and my favorite the Kastmaster, all to mimic peanut bunkers and/or other wider profile forage fishes. These baits can be used to target false albacore, Atlantic bonito, blues, Spanish mackerel, stripers, summer flounder and gray trout and I also use them, especially the gold ¾-ounce Kastmaster to target spotted sea trout and red drum from the surf. You can see also see that I mentioned everything from typically top-water predators like false albacore and Spanish mackerel to bottom dwellers like summer flounder and gray trout. Yes, these baits can be effectively worked throughout the water column by varying retrieval speed and height of the rod tip as you “look” to find where your target fish are feeding. Frequently I will stop my retrieval and let the metal tumble down to the bottom like an injured fish, and then rip it off the bottom and continue my retrieve.

In general these baits, which range from a fraction of an ounce to several ounces, are found in silver or gold, some have other colors like the blue stripe on a Kastmaster and many now sport holographic reflective tape. My preference is holographic gold tape, with a fish scale pattern. It really jazzes up the metal lure and dramatically increases its visibility for fish that see first and eat second. Other typical reflective tape colors commonly available in your local tackle shop include blue, green, red, silver and even purple.

Finally we have the bottom dwellers, the lead-head jigs that are jigged and dragged along the bottom. These are baits can be used as single lead head from 1/16-onuce to one-ounce depending on conditions and water depth, tipped with a replaceable soft plastic or flavored bait like Berkley Gulp!. They can be made in tandem where two lead-heads are tied together with a dropper loop in between or as a tandem rig with lead-head and teaser fly. These also can be made with soft plastics that are pre-molded over a weighted hook. Some of my favorite pre-molded weighted soft plastic baits include Storm’s Swimming Mullet, Betts Halo Shad and for shrimp imitations some of the most popular include the new Vudu Shrimp, DOA Shrimp, and both Storm and Betts both have great looking plastic shrimp baits as well.

In the summer I like to fish for summer flounder both in the ocean surf, from any of the ocean fishing piers and from my kayak. My go-to artificial bait for flounder is the tandem rig with a soft plastic or Gulp! bait (swimming mullet, shad or shrimp) on one side and a teaser fly that is a mimic for the Atlantic silverside or bay anchovy, on the other side.

What are the “best” colors for any or all of these artificial baits? Just keep is simple, you want something light in color, white is a good start, you need something dark, black is not a bad choice and of course chartreuse. If it ain’t chartreuse…you know how that goes!

So the next time you go fishing have a vision of the vertical water column and work the ladder from top to bottom to find your target trophy.

Top-Down Artificial Baits

Mediocre Trout Fishermen, listen-up

I was at a meeting of the Saltwater Light Tackle Fishing Club where Don Willis (Custom Marine Fabrication, New Bern) was the guest speaker talking about new fishing tackle and gear he saw at the recent Henry’s show in Raleigh. He showed us some cool stuff, and also made an observation that I think was right on. He said “Berkley Gulp! and suspending baits have turned mediocre and poor trout fishermen to good trout fishermen.” Just think about it, anyone can almost catch just about anything on the Gulp! flavored baits. And suspending hard plastics baits are recent proven killers of trout, drum and you name it. These days there are other flavored baits as well as special secret formula juices, pastes and sprays out there, to enhance your baits and attract fish, all of them work extremely well, and you don’t need to be a genius to use them. You toss them out, you bring ’em in and viola, you catch fish. The suspending baits, like MirrOlure Catch 2000, or their 17 and 27-MR series are also equally deadly. You throw them out and let them sink (they don’t really suspend, they sink slowly), add a few twitches and during the pause and drop-down, and they are nailed by hungry, aggressive trout, especially in the winter.

MirrOlures from top to bottom on the left (menhaden style):

1. Catch 5
2. MR 27
3. MR 17
4. MR 14

MirrOlures on the right, top to bottom (mullet style):

1. Catch 2000
2. MR 19
   

MR 17 and peanut pogy (or is it Memorex?)

There is some finesse with these baits. I particularly like to use the lightest jig head with the Gulps!, usually 1/8 or 1/16^th oz. or even better unweighted and fished weedless with one of the bass worm hooks. These and other soft plastics are also excellent producers fished on the ultimate of suspending baits, the cork where you have total control of the movement and motion of the bait. If you fish these often you will quickly notice that most of the hits occur in the settling and drop down phase, when nothing is seemingly happening. So fish both the corked and uncorked slow and low and only twitch the baits from time-to-time. Ditto with the suspenders, and I don’t mean the ones that hold up your pants. Cast, let the current drift the bait when possible, occasionally twitching the bait. Again in the “sleep” phase is when you should expect the hit, bite or bump, so be ready or you may miss the fish. All this is well and good, but you also have to remember, if there are no fish around, it really doesn’t matter what bait you use, finessed or not.

Soft Plastics fished on a cork

We are currently talking winter and early spring fishing, with lethargic fish that can barely produce a light tap or bump, and on somewhat slack line, one of the non-stretch braided lines is a must, or you risk missing fish. Personally I use 10-pound test PowerPro Braided line with a 12-pound fluorocarbon leader, others use 15 or 20-pound test braid with a matched fluorocarbon leader.

So if you want to improve your trout fishing give the new generation of scented baits and the flashy “suspending” baits a try and easily upgrade your catches from poor to wow! Of course this is all well and good, but you also have to remember, if there are no fish around, it really doesn’t matter what bait you use, finessed or not.