In a series of articles from Greg K. about reel maintenance, Greg has wrote his second article talking about the “ins” and “outs” of various reels and the affects of improper maintenance. Greg dives inside of various reels and highlights the working parts and areas most adversely affected by the elements. Learn from one of the best reel experts in the business and read Reel Maintenance - The “Ins” and “Outs” - Part 2.
Greg tells us that he is working on another piece to this series. Stay tuned and feel free to discuss your reel maintenance tips in our Comments section below the article.
One of Causeway Bait and Tackle’s Pro-Staff Members just posted an awesome article on reel maintenance for the off-season. Greg K. has profound knowledge of reels and knows the ins and outs about them. In this two-part series, Greg goes on to discuss how to properly maintain your reels. Proper maintenance will help your reel last many seasons thus, maximizing your purchase to the fullest. Start reading the reel maintenance article now.
For those reading from warm weather climates where you experience year round fishing, don’t turn away just yet. You may find a tip or two in here to keep your reels lasting several more years. Check back to see part two of this series which will include detailed pictures and more great tips to making your reels last.
It’s no secret around Causeway Bait and Tackle that I enjoy cod fishing. I can still remember my first cod caught in the winter of 1960 with Capt Richie Kessinger on the Capt Jack VI. I guess that kind of makes me old school.
For bait fishing, I believe in keeping things very simple. I still think the best codfish hook is a 6/0 sproat #399. This can be fished on a 12-18” leader or… Read the rest of this entry »
This “How To” article was submitted to our Blog from “Tyler”… a.k.a. the “SNAPPERMAN”!
Thanks Tyler!!
CLACKER RIGS
Clacker rigs, usually fished with a shrimp at the bottom down south on the flats for redfish and seatrout, but they are killer up north as well.
The commercial ones consist of a heavy piece of wire with beads and a float on it, then a couple feet below is a lure. These work, but if you want to make your own, get a snapper popper and insert a couple of those insert rattles used in soft baits. I do better with the snapper popper because it makes more noise and casts farther. I can also adjust the height of the float to determent what depth my lure is at. You usually want to have your lure about a foot off the bottom.
Clacker rigs are fished by twitching the float on the surface and making as much noise and commotion as possible. As you twitch it, it also causes the small lure to rise and fall like a struggling baitfish. The noise attracts the fish but the killer wounded bait fish action is what gets them to strike.
I use them in less then 8′ of water in the back bays and on the flats. Use it when it is dead calm, or fish it in a place with some current and let it get sucked into a shallow rip, or over a small hole or drop off. Also works well in small tidal creeks and around drains.
For the lure at the bottom, I use gulp! sand eels and gulp! shrimp, hawg shad, small soft plastics, teasers, flies, spearing, peanut bunker, or any other small lure or small bait fish threaded onto the hook. The key is that it must be light and unweighted, otherwise it will hinder the dying baitfish action. It will also cut back on your casting distance.
I also add smelly jelly to the lure I am using except gulp (it has the scent) and flies(it mats the hair and gets it all gunked up and kills the breathing action of the hairs) even though the sound is the main attractor, I think it helps, especially in murky water
I use it the most in the spring when fish are spread out over the flats in search of food. The fish are very lethargic since the water is cold and will only hit slow moving lures. Often in the spring when fish are spread out the water is also murky. This makes it difficult for the fish to find your lure. If you use a big bait to get the fish’s attention or a popper they will ignore it or simply follow it.
The clacker rig attracts the fish and it has a slow action that triggers the fish’s instinct to attack.
It also works well when game fish are feeding on small hard to match bait fish that are schooled so dense it is hard to get you lure noticed. Catch one of the spearing, sand eels, peanut bunker, etc. or use a lure around the edges of the school.
The noise helps your presentation stand out and get noticed. You can now also present a small lure that you might not have been able to cast very far. This also works at night around a full moon when schoolies are crashing small baits on the flats.
I usually catch bass, blues, and fluke with this method, but it works with weakfish, porgies and flounder as well. If you were targeting weakfish I would use a pink gulp sand eel or a pink gulp shrimp. Fish it around dawn or dusk in known weakie hangouts on a preferable tide. I never did well with weakies but that’s probably because it mainly fish the north shore but I have caught some summer run weaks on the south shore.
I hope this helps you catch a bunch of fish on new type rig if you haven’t tried it before.
Thanks to Joseph Gittleman for submitting this how to article.
This is a problem for most angler as judging how much braid and
backing the reel will hold can be a bit of guesswork at times or very
frustrating if you come up short. The method to solve this is very
simple but does take a bit of easy work. and some simple equipment at
hand.
1- spool the empty reel with the amount of braid you want on the reel
2- tie in your backing using a simple knot, nothing fancy needed
3- fill the rest of the spool to your desired lip depth with your
backing of choice
4- Now take off the backing by either reeling onto a spare spool or
use an old line filler spool through bolted and inserted into the
chuck of an electric drill.
5- take off the braid using the same technique, but onto a different
reel or spool
6- now that the reel is empty, tie on the backing you just backed off
and reel it on.
7- tie in the braid, with a good knot this time, and reel it back on
under moderate pressure
8- you now have the reel spooled perfectly to the lip depth you want
for optimum casting.
With the amount of Striped Bass around these days, plugging in the back bays with light tackle can be a GREAT way to catch them. It’s fun, a little more challenging than bait fishing and it can be done from shore, from small boats and even from a kayak.
First things first… the fish you’re targeting… the Striped Bass. Bass are “ambush” predators, no two ways about it, they will find places to set up and wait for food to come to them. They are also very structure oriented, meaning they use things like bridges, marsh banks, bottom contour and currents to find their food. Keeping these basic characteristics in mind you can dramatically narrow down the places to start plugging.
Tackle: There is no wrong or right tackle set up for this type of fishing and the only thing we recommend is to use an outfit that is suited for the plugs or lures you’re planning on using. Personally, for conventional outfits, I like a 7′ (ish) baitcasting style rod with a low profile baitcasting reel. The exact model I use is the St. Croix Premier series PC 70 MHF with the new ABU Garcia Revo Inshore reel. The rod is a fast action, light weight rod that can throw anything between 1/4 ounce and 1 ounce very comfortably and the new Revo reels are smooth as silk, hold plenty of line and they have a massive drag for their size. For line on this outfit I like the good old Berkley Big Game in 12 pound test. For a spinning outfit, again a 7′ rod and reel loaded with 10 or 12 pound test. Personally I like my St. Croix Premier, PS70MHF, and a Shimano Stradic ST4000I.
For lures, there are a million lures that will get a Striper but you should basically have enough to cover the water column, from top to bottom. Starting on the surface, poppers can be an effective and fun way to fish. Some of my personal favorites are the Smack-It’s, You-Zuri Mag Poppers, Storm Chug Bugs, and the Tsunami Talking Poppers. These all work quite well and they’re equipped with hooks that won’t get mashed if a bigger fish eats it. Moving down in the water column, swimming plugs are hard to beat. Some lures swim up near the surface, some deeper and some swim at a depth that you determine. A few of my favorites are the Bomber A-Salt, Yo-Zuri Live Bait Minnow, Yo-Zuri Mag Darter and a variety of plastic baits like Tsunami Swim Shads, Fin-S Fish, Slug-Go’s and Bass Assasin’s. What’s nice about the plastic baits is they can be fished at any depth depending on how you rig them and how you use them… extremely versatile baits! Finally, fishing near the bottom is always effective and lures like the previously mentioned plastic baits and Bucktails are hard to beat. I tell many of our customers that if I had to choose one lure to catch a Striped Bass, for the rest of my life, I would choose a white Bucktail! Bucktails are very diverse too, meaning they can be fished higher in the water column, you can swim them or jig them, but I like a slow steady retrieve along the bottom for this type of fishing.
Where to fish is the most difficult part, but with a little common sense and experience you can easily find places that hold fish on a regular basis. Current and tides play the biggest role in plug fishing in our area and around here it’s hard to go wrong around high tide. I always liked the later half of the incoming tide or the first half of the outgoing, and i do NOT like fishing around slack tide. Remember, these fish stalk they food, so when the current isn’t moving all the bait fish are scattered about and they don’t concentrate in any particular order or any particular condition. But when the current is moving, the bait fish will find a place they like and set up shop and now and then when they try and move off somewhere they get swept into areas where the Bass are waiting… those are the places to fish!
Shake the cobwebs off the gear folks…. It’s spring, the water temps are rising, the ice is gone and it’s time to go fishing again!
Flounder season is basically the start of our entire fishing season in this area and although the Flounder population, in our bays, have been at historically low levels, people still can’t wait to get back out on the water. Many people use the Flounder season as a “shakedown” for the boats and gear… to get everything ready for Bass fishing and Fluke fishing, but for those that still try, there ARE some Flounder to be caught in our area!
Here on the south shore of Long Island, the Winter Flounder season is basically the first fish we can fish for in the spring and although everyone would love to fire up the boats and blast off to their fishing spots, too often the best spots are simply overlooked. The water temps are still cold in the early spring, so those Flounder are going to be hiding in areas that warm up fastest, like the northern sides of our bays. Typically, like any other body of water in North America, the north side gets the most sun, therefore heating up faster. What also helps the water temps are the dark mud bottoms. These conditions can commonly be found in the mouths of back bay creeks and canals. We here of more people catching flounder right from their docks, than from those who venture off into the bays. The canals typically have thick, mucky, mud bottoms and subsequently hold all kinds of bait creatures that the Flounder love to eat… worms, mussels, grass shrimp and crill, to name a few.
The usual Flounder baits are Sandworms, Bloodworms, Clams and Mussels and I know that if I were going Flounder fishing I would absolutely have a little of each. One day they’ll eat the sandworms and the next day they may want the mussels, so I like to have a selection with me… because you just never know! I can recall a number of flounder trips where I was catching fish and others around me were simply watching, because I had one particular type of bait that they did not.
Once you find a good looking spot, START CHUMMING and DON’T STOP! Put the chum pot on the bottom… loaded with clam or mussel chum , break up some mussels, crush some clams or clam shells and don’t forget the corn… yes, corn. Spread it all around the boat, especially up-current from where you’re anchored, to make sure it’s on the bottom where your lines will be. We sell dried corn in the shop or you can swing by any grocery store and pick up a couple cans of corn. The theory behind the corn is that the yellow color resembles part of the inside of a bank mussel and attracts the flounder. I remember working on the party boats as a kid, spreading corn all around the boat while we were fishing and then finding the corn in the bellies of the fish when we fillet them…. so we know they eat it!
Rigging for Flounder is quite simple, one or two hooks with a 12″ leader tied a couple inches above your sinker. Flounder are flat fish that live on the bottom, in some cases buried in the bottom, so make sure whatever rig you choose, it’s the one that will keep your bait laying on the bottom! There are a wide variety of hooks that can be used and there is NO right or wrong hook, so to speak. Flounder have very small mouths and no teeth, so the hooks should be big enough to hold the bait your using and small enough for them to suck it all in, in one bite. Personally, I like a size 6 or size 8 sproat style hook but Flounder hooks with beads on the line, above the hooks, seem to be very popular as well . The yellow beads, for example, seem to have a similar effect as chumming with corn, looking like part of a mussel. Red beads are thought to look like part of a worm and theoretically attracting fish to your bait. Working in a tackle shop affords us the benefit of listening to what everyone is using, even if it seems like a gimmick. People go as far as to paint their sinkers yellow and red, looking for any advantage they can get. Over the past few years we’ve seen rigs with rattles in them, small yellow and red twister tails, blades and about a million other types of hardware too. I don’t know, I’ve used about every hook imaginable and don’t ever recall any beads making a significant difference in my hook up ratios… but it certainly can’t hurt, that much I can say. Pre-tied, ready to fish flounder rigs are also readily available and we stock a wide variety of them. Again, in our opinion, there is NO wrong or right rig to use as long as that rig will keep your bait ON THE BOTTOM!
These are just some of the basics, and it really is a kind of “meat and potatoes” style of fishing. Anchor the boat, chum like crazy, keep those baits on the bottom and have plenty of patience.
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