On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 16:51:02 -0500, Harry Krause
wrote:

I'm going to try to give up using "live" bait or fish chunks (bait that
was once live) and concentrate on using hard lures and plastics. I
started thinking about doing this last season, and started making the
transition towards the end of the year, going back to the lead-headed
jigs with plastic shrimp, and some of the other larger plastics that
served me so well in NE Florida. Last season, from August on, I
experimented in the Bay with the usual dead fish bait one buys at the
bait stores and with plastics, and the fish-caught count was about even
most days.

I might still use chum bags as an attractant, though. Yes, chum is
formerly live bait. But, then, the life of a fisherman isn't binary.

Interesting.

Around Narragansett and environs, you might say it's about 60/40 live
to artificial. If you want the monster stripers, live is the only way
to go, but last year, I hit a 40 inch striper on a salmon streamer
fished off the bottom as a teaser about three feet up from a 24 inch
tube. My biggest on live eel was 30 inches and a rather light fish at
that.

I use artificials almost exclusively for most of the stuff I fish for
with the exception of offshore which is a different game.

All my salt water fly rodding is with heavy lures/lines and lot's
patience looking for swirls and surface activity.

I don't chum unless I'm sharking and that's not often - I think the
shark fishery is in danger of becoming over fished, if it isn't
already, from the constant barrage of "tournaments" from every bait
shop and marina along Long Island and New Jersey. I do chum when
catfising on the Connecticut River and have caught a couple of cats in
the 20 pound category doing that.

Later,

Tom
S. Woodstock, CT
----------
The years will bring their Anodyne,
But I shall never quite forget,
The fish that I had counted mine
And lost before they reached the net.

Colin Ellis, "The Devot Angler" quoted
in A. R. Macdougall, Jr's "The Trout
Fisherman's Bedside Book" (1963)