fishing tip exchange

[b1gf1sh1]

heres a tip i learned from my grandpappy amos. with appropriate sized lures i've used it on muskie, walleye, pike, bass, and caught other fish doing it like cats and carp while fishing for others. take a JOINTED minnow bait or similar bait and remove the tail section. add a worm hook ( i use a 3/0 on a 3 or 4 incher) where the tail section was. slide whatever color plastic worm on the hook you want. fish it. reel, twitch, off a threeway, whatever. steadily with a pause here and there works for me most times. if you want it more weedless you can take any other trebles off and fish it with the worm hook point up. great for quick color change presentaitions too. just change worms till you get the one they want. all i ask is if you like this tip after you read this leave one of your own. hence the whole exchange thing. if you hate this idea but like somebody elses leave one for them. your turn.

[slipperybob]

Using the same general idea, use a regular floating minnow. Take some tube plastics, cut the head off so that you have a skirt. slide the skirt onto the body. You may want to remove the hooks while you put the skirt on and place the back afterwards. It makes your minnow now with a soft body. It does deaden the lure a bit.

[b1gf1sh1]

nice tip slip. sounds like an effective twitch bait and the slow reel you eluded too, or both combined... mabe a threeway with a long leader, huh? either way i see it as a slow, or pause presentation. i put this in my fishing journal for things to do/try next year thanks. ( to get the action back to the lure i'm going to try and add a ''suspend strip'' or ''suspendot'' to the ''front'' somewhere.

[slipperybob]

Hate to lose that expensive lures of yours?

Takes a little work but instead of using the split rings, tie the hook with fishing line directly to the eye loop. Make sure the fishing line is less # than the line you're fishing with. So if I fish with 8# line I'll use 6# to tie the treble hooks onto my crank lure. That way if I'm probing rocks and my hook hangs up. The chance of a line break will be higher in the lighter # line.

The other advantage to using fishing line is that if you want to weigh your crank down, a little split shot will fit right on the line in between the hook and lure.

[b1gf1sh1]

that's what i'm talkin about!!! off the wall stuff. never did this one of yours before. worth a try? we'll see. my solution to this problem is a little different than yours but quite effective just the same. it takes a digital postal scale or one more sensitive. i have one for precise gram weighting of ballasts for lures i make, and just to see what a lure weighs. i take off the trebles and put single wire hooks that weigh the same, or dip the shank in my lead melting pot to get the weight right so the lure keeps pretty much the same action. wire hooks bend easy and pull free of snags. just have to fight with a looser drag. very nice around those falldowns and log jams in the bays out on rivers or lakes. rocky places too. ok for medium weed ripping too, but i prefer a stiffer hook for this. thanks slippy, again.

[john.wells]

Tip up trick for ice fishing: instead finding your depth and setting your length with a marker bobber, use a lindy rig type set up. Experiment with line length, plain hook, floating jigs, floating inline floaters(for lack of better term, you know the type found on lindy rigs) different weights, etc... to find what works. Works great on the Croix with the slight current. I have even used night crawlers if bait shops have them and caught sturgeon (was hoping for cats). Best part-all you have to do is drop the line down wherever you move to without farting around with resetting depth.

[so haaad]

Now that's a tip! Thanks John.

[TRZ]

big tip-quit dreaming about open water already, my advise would be to ice fish or move to florida it will be along time till the croix is open again. by the time open water hits we will have forgotten these tips-ice fishing tips are a good idea though.

[b1gf1sh1]

this thread was made for fishing tips. feel free to post a ice fishing tip TRZ. personally i don't fish on ice. so me givin' ice fishing tips is inappropriate. and i keep a journal for just about anything i learn so i won't forget it. besides in the spring this can be restarted with a simple comment. please leave a tip any tip and nothin' but a tip. ok i'll try to give a good ice fishing tip. safety tip. if you wear laced boots loose lace them so you can kick them off easier so treading water will be easier. carry two strong ice picks with a lanyard holding them together so you can pull yourself out.sand works wonders for traction. bring a small bag of sand with you. when unsure of ice conditions wear a life vest.

[TRZ]

if it comes to the point that I'm so nervous about the ice i need to bring a bag of sand i will lock myself in a padded room and never fish again, quit drinking, quit eating anything non-organic and of course quit smoking and always wear my seat belt,helmet,life jacket, and always listen to my wife and mother!

[b1gf1sh1]

there is no tip considered too stupid everybody so go ahead and leave one. anyhow, have another for everyone. for you buzzbait guys/gals, remove the prop blade and take a square nail(masonry nail) and drive it into the pivot holes to make them square. put it back together and now you have a super rattler buzzer. great for making muskie and bass mad. . for metal blades only.i should also mention the hole does'nt need to be much bigger, just square. too big and it wont spin.

[b1gf1sh1]

heres an emergency heat source you can keep handy safly. a metal can, like a coffee can, a roll or two of toilet paper, a pint or two of rubbing alcohol, and some matches,white tip is best. and a piece of tinfoil that fits over the top to put it out. put one roll of toilet paper in the can, pour one pint of the alcohol into the roll untill it's all soaked up. light a match and toss it in. instant blue flame heat. everything can be kept in the can safly anywhere you need it, like trunk, in shack, where ever. of course away from other heat sources would be ideal. use in ventilated area

[slipperybob]

Not an actual tip, but was a mod that I did to a tandem spinner blade. I kind of like those nice fish head profile and they just don't come in an in-line. So I bent the wire slip down a few beads and slid the swivel blade down. So now it's almost like an inline spinner. Cut the skirt down some (I don't like such a big skirt) and just add your favorite plastic minnow. It's a pike killer as wells as for bass. Lost this lure fishing when line snapped...long story. Thinking of doing another mod, but I might use a smaller profile one next time. Might even swap the blades and use the bigger willow leaf.

[b1gf1sh1]

thanks slippy well like my grandpappy Amos always said...'' if ya' aint confadunt in 'dat bait yer got on, yer jist feeshin' fer water''. i miss that man profile has been proven to help catch fish. and a profile of a head vs. a round/oval/teardrop profile of the weight would be better i'd think.

[slipperybob]

I've got an emergency make shift slipbobber. As sometimes it happens that line breaks and bobber goes down stream. So anyway, get yourself some piece of wood, a stick maybe about four inches. Use one of your hooks, cheap aberdeen, and straighten the hook out some. Jab it into the end of the stick. Now you've got that eye on the hook to slip your line through and your back in business. Plus it makes for a really stealth approach for finicky fish. It beats using a ballon or an empty water bottle.

Well I actually do this to some of the broken bobbers I see floating around on the lakes that people discard. In a way it gets rid of the litter and I gain a free bobber to custom.

[b1gf1sh1]

nice one slippy.i've used that same thing... weird huh? also used hooks with styrofoam pieces. just hook it in and rig it up. spose it would work with most things that float. i'm experimenting with a new way to make a double blade muskie bucktail (i pass boredom making stuff for next year) into a four blader that doesnt reel in too hard. used it a little before ice up and seemed to work ok except i want it noisier. anybody know where to get solid silver blades??? i can get silver sheet and silver rounds and ovals but the waste would be spendy. will if i have to just hoping for some way out. anyway, don't let your terminal tackle get unruly, use safety pins. put swivels, splitrings, snaps, hooks, spinner blades, and anything else you see fit on safty pins to keep them managable. also works good for the above bobber tip if bent before hole and snipped after, just have to use a mega bead.

[slipperybob]

An actual ice fishing tip idea!

Well you know about pulling a sled full of gear and when it's snowing out, everything in the sled get's snowed on. You could buy a tarp or a cover for that. But I just used another sled and flipped over. Was planning on drilling holes and sticking in a dowel pins or even attaching a hinge to flip sled over. If I get really smart I'll use some locks and secure everything inside. However for now I'm just clamping it down. I've got two Shappel jet sleds XL's. The lips aren't flat perfect but pretty close. The other use I find it pretty handy is loading and unloading by oneself. One sled on the truck the other on the ground. Unload off one and load up the other.

When you look at a matching cover with a premium price of $40-$70, that's basically the cost of a sled itself.

[slipperybob]

If you're cheap and really cheap you can have your own home made ice scoop. Take a plastic bottle, probably one of those juice or sporst drink bottle because the plastic is a little tougher than your average water bottle. The bigger bottles do have a larger bottle cap and neck so finding a stick and augmenting it to fit snugged in the hole takes a little tweeking with some rope around the stick. So anyway you just cut open the bottle in the shape of a scoop and punch a few nail holes in the bottle to drain water out. It's just as effective as any ice scoop.

If you do the same to a small bottle, you can have a minnow scoop. In the end though it's not as cost effective as a 99 cent minnow scoop.