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Hpralri & Lantern 4 [anuary '84

sports

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Tricks With Minnows Can Make Difference

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Since I have been fishing I have heard a statistic which indicates that 90 per cent of all of the fish caught with a rod and reel are caught by 10 per cent of the people who fish. What that indicates is that those people who are catching fish are better prepared,’ better skilled, better • equipped and that they have worked harder at perfecting their skills. Little things people do make all the difference in the world. Some days the “tricks" work well and other days, they do not make a difference. But. those anglers who have developed little "bags” of tricks to fall back on usually ^o best Most of us fish with o minnows dailies if you are from up north). Miqnows should be fished alive and a bait car or minnow bucket is a must. In fishing for flukfe, one of the good ways to fish is to tie a bucktail (lead-headed jig) directly to the end of the line. Bait the jig with a minnow and it makes a good fluke rig. Add a strip of squid, sea robin, shark, fluke belly, herring or bunker to the bait and it is even better. But, one of the tricks which seems to work well is to hook the minnow on the j^g in an up-side-down position. Normally, you liphook the minnow with the hook in an upright position and the minnow with the dorsal fin fright. Try hooking the minnow with the dorsal down and the hook upright so that the minnow will constantly be trying to turn over against the weight of the »jib.TJigs are designed so that they will ride with the hook upright, so it is easy to figure out how to hook the minnow in an up-side-down position. ANOTHER GOOD minnow trick is to lighten up your minnows when fishing in dark water or over dark bottom. Minnows, as do most other fish, tend to adopt the color of the bottom over which they are hovering. Some fluke are

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dark brown and this indicates a darker bottom. Others are mottled and lighter in color, indicating stony, sandy or irregular texture and color to the bottom. It is. part of nature’s camouflage. How do you “lighten” the color of the minnows? Try putting them in sea water in a white cooler for a while before you use them for bait. The minrfpws will get a lot lighter and when you fish them over dark bottom, they will stand out better, for a while at least. The minnows will lighten up because of the w lute bottom of the cooler. In fresh water fishing with minnows, when using a bobber or float, the tendency is to hook the minnow just under the dorsal fin in the middle of the back. After a minute or two the minnow will just hang in one spot under the float and wifi hardly move at all. To keep the minnow moving and to keep the bait active so it entices bigger fish, try hooking the minnow so that the hook is on the side of the minnow ins'tead of the top. The minnow is in the water under the float. It will be on its side and since the natural tendency of the minnow is to be upright,Sit will keep swimming to get itself into the natural position. Meanwhile the hook tencb to keep pulling the minnow over on its side. It is believed that when a fish is struggling in this manner, it emits warning signals which are picked up by other fish through the lateral line along the side of the game fish. In any event, a struggling bait tends to attract more game fish. THERE ARE all kinds of tips and tricks which work We tend to see things in our eyes and in our minds and we really do not always know what a fish sees or hears or thinks. W'e' do know that noise, splashing and thrashing attract fish when live baits are used. Lots of artificial baits utilize the noise theory and

rattle baits are being used -in both fresh and salt water. Steel BB shot is used in some cases to make a rattling noise and in other cases, beads are threaded loosely over a leader inside or as part of a lure to make noise as the lure is pulled through the water. When we were doing a lot more fresh water fishing, we found that it helped to paint the sides of the minnows we used in the lakes with merchurochrome. Some of our angler friends also tried nipping off the pectoral fins on one side of the minnow to make it swim in an erratic fashion when suspended under a bobber. Somehow, we never could quite get around to clipping the minnow's Tins. It didn’t seem quite cricket, which is probably a contradiction in thinking because it never really presented a problem to put a minnow on a hook for bait in either fresh or salt water. We also found that the bullhead minnows we get in salt water would work great in fresh water and we caught lots of largemouth bass, pickerel, perch and calico bass on them. For calicos, however, the problem was to get enough small minnows. We found that if they were about an inch long they worked best for calico bass. We also like small minnows for white perch and if the weather, stays cold enough we’ll be up on the ice at Collins Cove to try perch fishing sooner than we thought we would be. WINTER FISHING often presented a problem in . fresh water with minnow baits because we never could get minnows at certain times of the year. One year we solved the problem of the minnow supply by utilizing the bathtub in the second floor summer apartment over top of the year-round apartment we were living in. It made a dandy bait storage tank and as long as we Ijept the spigot trickling slowly, the water stayed fresh and the

minnows stayed alive for a good long time. The water level in the tub remained safe because the surplus went out of the overflow. That is, it always did until we got a stretch of real cold weather. The tub drained into an outside stack on the north side of the house and the wintry winds beating on the cast iron pipe caused the water to start to freeze inside the pipe. Eventually, the ice formed a plug inside the stack. The inevitable was for the tub to overflow. It in turn flooded out the downstairs bathroom. Needless to say, my minnow storage idea was soon discarded. Keeping minnows alive is a problem. For long hauls, an aerator works best. Use a battery operated one or get one which plugs into . your cigarette lighter on the car or truck. You can also try O-Tabs, a chemical which slowly releases oxyen into the water while the minnows are being transported. We used an old footpump hose and an inner tube as an emergency air supply. To do so, just back out the tube valve far enough to allow air to bubble out slowly through the foot pump hose into the water which holds the minnows. It may take a couple of tries ‘o adjust the bubbles, but ls long as you keep the footpump with you, you can always refill the tube, giving you an almost endless supply of air to bubble through the water. Don’t make the mistake of using your spare tire as an alternate source of air. I did that only until I used up the air in my spare and then got a flat. Naturally, the foot pump was in my garage.

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