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. 

Fishing For Montana

Image Above: The Montnana John Wiggler

A couple of weeks ago a fellow angler who fishes in Montana called John sent me an e-mail offering his own thoughts on fishing lures and pike and suggested I make a wobbler and lose the central treble and replace the rear with a single hook. I have had to learn to take advice it is not ability that comes naturally I prefer to make my own mistakes before seeing sense. So after initially rejecting the idea for no good reason other than it was somebody else’s, I had a little time to think.

I have on balance caught considerably more fish on single hooks than on trebles, admittedly many have been with bait, flies or as feather rigs but when it comes to lure fishing I have fallen into that trap of believing more hooks can only be  good. There is a point when I suppose a lure could carry enough hooks to be considered as a storage device in its own right rather than a piece of tackle. What are all these hooks doing they cannot all be hooked into the fish. The initial idea for multi trebles is to insure that if a predator so much as looks at the lure the chances are it is going to feel some chemically sharpened metal. Once hooked the other trebles can become a headache either damaging the fish or hooking up with other debris when the fish runs for cover. I have a fear of landing nets or should I say a combination of landing nets, fish and treble hooks. On one occasion this cocktail led almost to full scale surgery removing one hook from the fish and other from the fish and the net: I have never used so many forceps and pliers and still come away with a whole in my net.

Still one lure one hook is a big step. I use a single treble on the Hybrid casting spoons and that works well especially for avoiding weed and as I often fish with my feet in water unhooking and returning pike can be as easy as giving a gentle shake in the right direction. There is always a chance I could miss a hook up but this is not just a problem with single hooks I have lost fish on three hook lures.

I sent an e-mail back to John to let him know I would have a go at making a single hook wobbler when I got the chance.

The Testing Session.

It wasn’t pretty as my prototypes seldom are, but it was through wired and I was pleased with the way I had concealed the weight. It ran a little shallow just what I needed to deal with the summer weed growth. But the action was great a tight wiggle rather than a wobble. As a mark of respect to that other Great Montanan, Norman McClean the author of ‘A River Runs Through It’, I dressed the single hook with a bit silver flash.

Once again I found my preparation a little lacking when I hooked my first pike on the ‘Montana John’ prototype, my camera was poised but unresponsive. Holding the rod up with one hand I opened the battery compartment with the other while simultaneously remembering that the battery was still on charge as it had been all night. I put the camera down and reached for the mobile phone which also has a camera but not the best quality.

I had been ten minutes at the lake and this was my first fish all one pound of a pikeling with a single hook firmly in the side of its jaw. John was right, unhooking the fish was simple it never even left the water. I put the prototype away vowing to give it a proper coat of paint but the pikes teeth had already punctured the balsa. I took six more pike over the next three hours on various homemade lures and made numerous poor quality images with my mobile phone and all the time planning to put the Montana John into some kind of production. 

Image Below: Mobile Phone Pictures of Pike