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
