Carving a finger full of balsa

A little bit of light carving.

What I wanted was something I could dropshot with that unlike a soft plastic lure it would have 

some buoyancy. The main advantages of dropshotting is keeping the lure a set distance from the bottom rather than guessing, while also working the lure without changing its position so effectively it gets to dance in a predator’s face rather than racing past . The disadvantage is keeping the rod up and the line tight plus it isn’t great at any distance.  Adding a small float above the hook can work for distance as it keep the line up out of any trouble but inversely it also reduces the distance of cast. So with this aside I thought I would make a floating dropshot lure for a trout and perch water I fish.

I didn’t have to look far for inspiration, when it comes to balsa trout lures there is of course Maki Handmade lures; it would be fair to say that if god wanted to make some fishing lures he would probably serve an apprenticeship with Maki.  There isn’t a lot to say about his workmanship, it would all be a bit superfluous just follow the link   http://blog.goo.ne.jp/makilure?fm=rss            (and don’t forget to come back).

Rather than resort to shell veneers I thought I would stick with foil and also limit my choice of finishes to a bit of black acrylic paint, a dab of red sharpie and 15-20 dibs in some model aircraft dope. One of my aims when I started making lures was to keep it simple and often I find myself jumping headlong into over-complication, while this can be fun I try to remember the person I was when I first began making lures. Keeping it simple means I didn’t want to get the airbrush out, I wanted to sit and just make without the hum of a machine or Darth Vader’s respirator.

So I sketched up what I thought would go for a prototype, redrew it in a Cad program and then printed it out as templates. Rough shaping the body was easy enough with the parting line between two pieces of 4.5mm balsa giving me a dead centre.

Carving the face required some very light music, I found a YouTube channel that played Gregory Alan Isakov, songs back to back and settled in for the duration. I shouln’t really call it carving, it was more a case of cut and sand; balsa being a bit of a pig when comes down to fine details. Carve, fit the through wire and weights, foil, paint with a bamboo skewer and then dip every half hour in dope until I lost count but a least over fifteen times would be a good guess.

So I have my lure it is a little smaller than my index finger and more importantly it has been finished just as the trout season is over so I won’t know its true value until next spring. It isn’t perfect but I know largely the bits that went wrong and how to avoid them in the future. This is a start and the learning has only just begun so I have quite a lot of fiddling about ahead of me. Maybe if I get a bit better at it I'll make a video.

Mackerel Feather Rigs Revisited

I have been back over some old ground, creating some more mackerel rig videos but I felt the original needed some improvements. Hopefully the addition of new patterns and videos will make the process of tying your own a little easier and maybe I can move on to breaking some new ground or at least get out fishing.

Stop Press. 

Depressingly the Marine Stewardship Council have taken mackerel off the ‘fish to eat list’ due to the threat of overfishing to its breeding stock in the north east Atlantic. 

Montana John Revisted

Image Above: A Pike With A Mouth Full Off Montana

I went to the lake this morning to test some new jigs heads I have been experimenting with and more importantly to avoid filming wooden minnows. The jig heads had an obvious fault, that is to say the fault was obvious when I put them in water. I had positioned the eye of the hook too far back from the front of the head which completely unbalanced them to the point where they wandered off on their sides, never mind.  The jig heads had been made with the idea of fishing the bottom of the lake where I suspected the pike had gone to hide out for the winter. The water isn’t deep about five to a  maximum of six foot but it is a snag ridden hole and lipped lures tend to pick a lot of lost fishing tackle when they bounce along the bottom; on my last session here I managed to take home three more lures than I had arrived with.   Soft plastics would be an obvious solution to this problem as they often come with single upturned hooks and faces that don’t mind bouncing over things, but having spent too long making hard baits I don’t fancy a change.  

With the intention of doing a bit of testing I had left my collection of lures at home and found myself with a very limited selection of alternatives to my wonky jig heads. I soldiered on for too long with the jig heads before I reached into the bag and pulled out a Montana John a lure designed to run just below the surface rather than at depth. On the far side of the lake the sun was at least throwing some warmth into the shallow water around the island and hoping a pike may have come to look for a basking spot I wandered over.   There was movement at the surface but it looked to be a carp chasing windblown feathers.

The Montana John was inspired by an American angler who suggested a single hook was all that was needed for a pike lure rather than a collection of trebles. To large extent he was right, my first outing with this lure as a prototype brought home a pike within a few casts and also as a bonus unhooking the toothy critter was an easy affair. But today it was winter and I needed every extra bit of help so I swapped the single hook for a treble and sent the lure across the lake. At first I didn't really notice the difference in the lure but when I moved back to deeper water I realised the extra weight of the hook had turned the lure into a slow sinker. 

Rather than sink in a horizontal position the heavier hook at the rear end meant it sank in a vertical position until the hook touched down.  As best I could make out when retrieved it ran hugging the bottom and when paused it went back to sinking to a standing position.  I quickly realised the advantage of this, the hook despite landing on the bottom seldom came into contact with it unless I paused to let it sink back and with a bent back lip I was no longer picking up stray lines. So I twitched it along the bottom like a walk the dog bait until my first bite came which I automatically assumed was a hook up with a plastic bag so I let the line go slack, the fish took up the slack running into the shade of a tree and was gone before I had chance to strike.

I moved along to one of the deeper swims where I had float fished in the summer and began bouncing and twitching the lure slowly over the bottom. It worked again and quickly I had another bite this time I kept the tension on and the pike came bounding out into the shallows a little pissed off with the sudden change in temperature. With only one treble to remove from the fish I released him without letting him leave the water and he swam to edge of the shallow water to recuperate.    

I left the lake with the same amount of lures as I had brought with me but one of them was at least a little different. 

Selling my Babies

That is it the first lures go on sale, I miss them already.

I am getting there

Image above: Handmade spoon lures, cast in Polyurethane, through wired and weighted, covered with textured foil, airbrushed and just awaiting a coat or two of Epoxy.

  This is it, the first day of producing fishing lures that will hopefully end up for sale.  I have spent the last three weeks preparing and making enough mistakes to have probably learnt something. If I had known how hard it was going to be and how much I would have to learn I am not entirely sure I would have started down this route. That said it has been fun so far, hopefully if I can sell them I may avoid getting a proper job and spend every Monday morning at the water’s edge and the rest of the week making lures. 

Foil, fimo, felt tips and fish

Image Right: Coal Fish on another home made Lure

After four years, my time on the island is coming to an end and there are still so many fish I never got to catch.  

 Overnight the wind along with the swell dropped until a stillness settled over the bay and Sound. Just after nine I padded up the street to collect Ryan who despite the prospect of holding a fishing rod while being sat in a boat on the North Atlantic, was in bed. I encouraged his would-be mother in-law and girlfriend to eject him using any means necessary before stomping off to the pier to sort out the boat and tackle. I don’t understand the idea of being late for fishing, every minute spent in bed is a minute stolen from the possibilities afforded by a fishing rod.

I checked the fuel, started the engine before stringing lines through rod eyes while I waited. Ryan finally made it to the pier and we headed out into the soup.  Our first mark was a small reef that had just become visible on the falling tide. I was fishing with another prototype made from Fimo (polymer clay, see pre. Post), and a little nervous, wondering if all the energy I had invested in the lure would bring any reward now I was out on the water.  First cast and a fish takes it, shit I was happy even after it threw the hook close to the boat. Second cast and this time it came home with a decent sized coal fish, at this point I didn`t care about the rest of the trip and to be honest it was not the best fishing trip on record.  Foil, Fimo, felt tips, wire, a bit of weight and a hook. 

Image below: Looking Back to Jura from the Sound of Iona

Image above: Drying Floats

I got back to bit of sliding float making using balsa wood that I had bought to make lures. It is a bit easier to work with than cork but still needs a lot of finishing with sand paper. The centres are once again of hollow cane and the heads have been airbrushed and then silver foil added. The foil really helps locating the float when the tide takes it some some distance especially in large waves.