TackleTour

Awesome pics everyone. I might as well looks at pictures of trout since I can't catch any yet. Southpaw, please post pics the custom painted Alde when it is done.

Not very new but, I have been sight fishing stocked trout with a either 1/16 or 1/32 tube jigs with a trout work trailer shaken between 6 inches to 4 feet beneath the surface, various colors.Very fun to see them track the tube and snatch it right by your feet.

sofinesse wrote: snatch it right by your feet.

That's the thing that surprised me the most when I started spin fishing again after 50 years as a fly fisherman. The times when they nail the lure with just 4 feet of line beyond the rod tip and then just start jumping. If that doesn't raise your pulse rate nothing will.

I often hold the rod tip just above the surface when near the end of the retrieve, and I've had several trout make a pass at the lure within inches of the rod tip. One of these days one will connect. Hope the rod and drag can handle it.

CM_Stewart wrote:

sofinesse wrote: snatch it right by your feet.

The times when they nail the lure with just 4 feet of line beyond the rod tip and then just start jumping. If that doesn't raise your pulse rate nothing will.

I agree. I have had big trout jump out of the water targeting the spinner as I lift it away... Always a good idea to make a sort of figure C (in running water) before lifting the lure out of the water. Still, I often forget to do it.

Trout stocking started happening in my area a few weeks ago and I am here to give you a report on a couple of lures that do not catch trout.

I spent about a week trying an assortment of inline spinners (mostly 1/8 RT's with the hook swapped for a single), spoons (mostly 1/8oz Kastmasters, again with a single hook), micro cranks (1/16-1/8 minnows, shads and even a 1/4oz lipless, which was my trout MVP last year) and small spinnerbaits. All of this got me a single trout and maybe 2-3 additional hits.

I was throwing them all on a Kuying Teton UL w/ PX68 spooled with 4lb mono.


My last day out I gave up and tied on a mystery popper I had found at the start of the week;


No idea who made it, but I would love to know, it is the best of the few UL poppers I have tried, it is very easy to pop and resists being pulled out of the water very well. In any case, a bass felt bad for me and thus ended my first trout-quest the season.


I gotta say, that Teton was amazing, I was really impressed at how it handled that bass, if there was any cover I would have lost the fight but I was able to turn and control him very well and was effortless to keep him pinned, even with a single hook point on the outside of his lip. I had forgotten how much I enjoy UL baitcasting, I need to get that combo into the general rotation.

Why single hook?
I use single hooks - rarely - when there is too much vegetation. For some spoons, I like the Owner S61. Otherwise, I swap the hook on all my inline spinners to Owner trebles. ST21 when the fish are below 2-3 kg and ST36 or thicker hooks when the fish are bigger. I “feel” that I get more hook-ups with trebles.

I use single hooks on all my hard baits under 1/4" or say 1-2" long. I do this for the welfare of the fish and myself.

Most of my UL/L hardbait fishing is for white perch and they will hit a lure 1/2 their own size with such aggression that it was very common to have small perch get all three treble points in their mouth, pinning it shut and making removal without killing the fish impossible. Switching to a single hook solved this and did not at all seem to affect my hookset ratio. It also helps a lot when I get a pickerel or bass as bycatch, both of which will swallow a small hardbait.

Now I have noticed that those same lures, when fishing for stocked trout, give noticeably worse hooksets then the same lures with trebles. I don't know if it is a difference in mouth hardness/geometry or that stockers hit moving lures less aggressively, but I do feel like I am missing hooksets on what felt like good hits. However, I only go after stockers a few times a year at most, so I am too lazy to either switch the hooks back to trebles or keep two sets of lures. I also don't think it is a huge increase is misses, but with the perch it is almost 1:1, with a solid hit almost always ending in landing the perch.

Trout season started locally last week. The fish were close, in the skinny, and finicky so I stuck to small plastics on trout magnet heads and hand ties.