Small Fish Stories - Perch Madness

This is from Freewater Pictures of Sweden (with subtitles). It has some top quality, top water, top perch and top pike action coupled with amazing photography and some heart stopping moments. Check out their Youtube channel for more epic films. https://www.youtube.com/user/FreeWaterPictures

Drop shotting with Steve Collett

I have watched a fair amount of how-to catch fish videos in my time, and often they are short on the how-to bit and little more aimed at shifting gear off a shelf or promoting a personality. This video from Steve Collett and Ecogear is really a great look the catching part and the techniques he uses to make himself one of the best lure anglers in the country. Let us hope this the start of something good.

Mr Wilson Goes Lure Fishing

A bit of lure fishing from John Wilson who was driven out of Britain by a gang of otters

Making A Weight Shift Balsa Fishing Lure Part 2 of 3

It is Boxing Day and it is cold enough to snow, even the weather reports are predicting a drop of the white stuff but as usual they have overdone things and are calling it the start of the next ice age. I am testing my weight shift lure while my wife complains about the loss of feeling in her extremities. There are no pike in this lake and no perch of any size; a winter fish kill a few seasons ago took its toll so I am casting for leaves, pleasure and the camera.

  Phox Minnow Weight Shift Balsa Fishing Lure Drawing

  Phox Minnow Weight Shift Tools and Materials

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.

Sushi Whip Tail Grub Molds / Moulds For Sale

In an attempt to pay for some much needed video equipment I am offering some Sushi Whip Tail Grub moulds for sale at £10 each plus postage. These are cast by me using high quality RTV silicone from my master, they take a day to cure and then a day later I give a test, if everything is ok I put in the post.   Recently I have done very well fishing with this grub on small jig heads, the body being just a little over half instead of fully round means the hook can be left to stand really proud, which seems to have helped hooking bony mouthed fish like the pike and the odd very greedy little perch.  

The grubs from the mould are 85mm (3 ¼” approx) long, the tails come out thicker than injected bait moulds which gives them a nice pulse that draws fish out even in the mucky ponds and canals I fish. If you are interested send me an email to paupadam@aol.com unfortunately I can only deal with paypal users.

Thanks

Drinks Can Vibe Lure

I often start a lure project with a big idea and then try to bolt ahead to the finish without paying too much attention to the details. This is great for quick prototypes but almost useless if I want them to last longer than a few chucks into pond. So this vibe lure is about the details for me, the real lure or big idea I want to make is a swimbait with a polycarbonate core but my main experience with polycarbonate comes from making minnow lips rather than anything structural.  Using polycarbonate as the lure body has put me on a really steep learning curve. It is an unbelievably strong material with a high impact resistance but a bit of a pain in the arse to drill and needs a bit of work to bring the edges up to a shine.

 Using the drinks can was something I thought about for a while; normally aluminium cans are coated internally with varnish which makes for a better surface for the glue to bond to than aluminium. Having pre-coloured and protected finishes also saves a bit of time.  So this was a bit of fun which really worked on the canal perch even if I didn’t catch anything bigger than a handful I mean a finger full. 

link to template

Old Red Eyes Is Back

Image Above: Balsa Crankbait Prototype, foiled and waiting for paint and epoxy

Crankbaits are as American as a certain type of pie; so it is with a bit of apprehension that I have begun messing round with my own little version of a trusted classic. Regrettably in the UK we don’t have that other American Classic to accompany the lure, freshwater bass. We do have the humble Perch and then there is always a chance that a pike may be in the market for a snack rather than a full meal. 

Why a crankbait? I was looking for a lure to work at close range on a particular type of water we seem to have a lot of in this country, old industrial canals. As man-made structures I often get the feeling when fishing them I am somehow just testing lures in an overly large bathtub and to certain extent because of that uniformity I find them very hard to read, but water is water and needs to be fished. Depth wise my local stretch is a maximum of  4’3” or 1.3m and anything from 15ft wide to double that, on the plus side it does run for 127 miles and at times it has felt like I have walked or possibly trudged every mile. Structure can be sparse with long sections of aquatic motorway hemmed in by concrete or reinforced banks. But then there can be narrow sections under bridges or turning bays for long boats, sometimes wild sections spring up with reeds and water lilies but still conforming to an engineered geometry.

To date my forays to the ‘cut’ (slang for canal) have not been particularly fruitful but then winter can bunch fish together create whole swathes of canal that are almost devoid of fish, so I make my excuses. Part of the problem has been making lures for open water fishing and expecting them to translate easily into more restricted situations, here working with short casts is the norm but not just short they also have to be a little more accurate.  

Like all bits of water that skirt urban and industrial areas the canal seems to attract  almost surrealist debris, I have found whole desktop computers with screens happily bobbing along still tethered with cables to the keyboard and hub. Supermarket trolleys are almost a staple hazard but a more common and unseen one is the plastic bag, half filled with silt they line the bottom ready to grab stray hooks and hold them until the little sack can be dragged to the bank. All inviting stuff; but then there can be sections so steeped in that Victorian past with cobble stones and brick warehousing that it would not seem out of sorts to bump into Dickens enjoying a constitutional.

I suppose I should know the basics of what makes a crankbait, but no matter how many lines I lay down on paper or re-plot on the computer the test and then the refinement comes only after I have had a good chance to throw it in some water; even then I devote more time than is healthy wondering if I should tweak it a little. So my latest crankbait balsa prototype is waiting for some coats of epoxy, paint and a lip. It’s through wire is reinforced by a brass weight so if I should find a monster or a monster plastic bag the wire will hold up. Rather than make it in two halves I have gone for the simpler slot approach with a hole for the belly weight.  It should end up about 65mm (2 1/2”) long and 10g (1/3oz) just on the light end of what my rod will cast. The shape is standard stuff but rather than taper to the tail or head I have gone for a flat sided approach to make it pump a bit more water and also simplify the design, should anyone else want to have a go at building it.

For finishes, well I have been experimenting again with resin additives and new ways of laying up foil to create some depth in the facial features.

So next comes a little more testing and the start of another How-to video with hopefully some fish catching footage or bag retrieval. 

Father's Day

Image Above: A very washed out looking perch.

It was father’s day all day. I got down to the lake early with the rain and a mobile phone that had run out of battery power to ensure I wouldn’t be recalled.  I fished with homemade floats and caught skimmers, roach and a fat perch but it wasn’t lure fishing. Luckily I have some balsa lures ready for a testing session later in the week.

The Montana John

I finally got round to finishing a small number of ‘Montana John’ fishing lures.  The lip and single hook make them look pretty distinctive and as lures go I think they are pretty unique. What I like about them best is the running depth at less than two feet I can get them into shallow water without constantly pulling weed from the lip. Jerking them along really makes the best of the dressed tail as together with body it has the look of a jointed lure. The price £12.50 plus postage, See the shop link in the side bar.