On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 22:01:50 -0500, Harry Krause
wrote:

Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:

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.

An awful lot of huge stripers here are caught off umbrella rigs with an
array of artificial lures. I've caught my biggest stripers here trolling
a big Mann's artificial plug.

One of those Mann's "Monster Magnum" plugs? :) I have a 30+ that I
fish off of a wire rig which has been productive along the SW Ledge
off Block Is. and the NW corner of Cox's Ledge where all the barge
wrecks are. I've found that a low, slow approach on one of the braids
works pretty good out there. Inshore, the 20 and 25 I have keep
hanging up.

Ah yes, umbrella rigs. I have a few, but I don't seem to have much
success with them unless I'm fishing shorelines in about 20/30 feet of
water. I also notice that bright green seems to produce better than
any other color. I do use them when I'm trying to cover a lot of
space in the water column and I can put them on outriggers. The one
interesting thing I have noticed about umbrella rigs is using a good
sized ball bearing swivel seems to help catch stripers. Doing some
experiments, it would appear that the swivel allows the rig to move
around like a small bait ball. Kind of counter intuitive, but that's
the way it is.

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)