Cut bait for stripers

[across the river]

I ain't no fish biologist, I ain't ever played one on TV and its been years since I slept at a Holiday Inn but I would posit the behavior you describe of live scope and cameras indicates a couple of things unrelated to finicky behavior. Chief among these is most likely due to having already eaten and not really being interested. The second is PRESSURE. When they have seen the same bait, presented the same way, in the same place hundreds of times a day and watched as one of their kind ate that bait and either panicked and released a warning scent that something aint right as they were hoisted against their will to the surface or did the same thing but soon returned to the cover in question it doesn't take long to realize that something just ain't what it appears to be. Consider the case of a 2 pound largemouth bass readily eating a 12 inch long jelly worm back in the day in gin clear water....something that happened, happily, on a regular basis. That fish ain't never seen no purple worm 12 inches long....it ate it anyway. If there were 12 inch long purple worms running about the planet something would have to be done about them....but fish readily ate those things like they'd been doing it all their lives when they would look at a hooked bream...something they have indeed eaten almost daily...and then ignore it completely. That ain't, in my opinion, being finicky....its being highly unpredictable. Either way that fish ate...and often times ate something it had never seen and resembled no food it had ever eaten.

You are absolutely spot on about matching the hatch....but it has nothing to do with being finicky, it is all about being focused on readily available food to the exclusion of everything else. I have seen fish of all kinds all over the world do this....but ONLY when a specific food source was in high abundance and was readily available. Most animals will do this, even humans. Humans can eat just about anything and do....but most eat roughly the same items to the exclusion of everything else because those items are there when they are hungry...when they could conceivably go out of their way to eat, I don't know, caviar instead.


Fish, not being the smartest intellects in the world but among the best animals on the planet at surviving, won't not eat a grasshopper, for instance, while they are awaiting a mayfly hatch. If they are hungry, which they are almost all of the time except just after they have just eaten, they will eat whatever is available and may even kill it with no intention of eating it....because they are fish. Bream and shad will hit a nipple or a mole on a 300 pound man swimming near them.....they surely don't mean to eat the entire thing and that bulk of an animal would seem to present some danger to a shad 3 inches long....but that sucker will try to take a plug out of that beast and eat him one nip at a time. When they aren't pressured they are opportunistic and if a source of food is abundant and available they will indeed momentarily focus on easy pickings even if it means burning more calories than they ingest in doing so...but when that food is no longer as readily available they will turn to such things as 12 inch long purple worms.

So you are saying they aren’t finicky, but they are finicky if they are in a lake that gets fished and/or primarily focused on a particular food source. Gotcha.

 

[Richf7]

I long for the days when the only things in my tackle box were a few pieces of terminal tackle, a floating Rebel, a bucktail, and a couple of plastic worms. Hardly ever got skunked.

 

[GTMODawg]

So you are saying they aren’t finicky, but they are finicky if they are in a lake that gets fished and/or primarily focused on a particular food source. Gotcha.

Not at all. They still gotta eat when they under tremendous pressure....very few bodies of water experience that kind of pressure for more than a few days a year and the fish soon forget all about it. Lake Lanier is a good example.....notoriously hard to fish on Sunday, by Monday after noon much easier and by Wednesday afternoon the difference is like nigh and day. I knew an old boy who was retired who followed bass tournaments all over the country but only fished starting the monday after final weigh in....and within a couple of miles of the weigh in site....and wore the fish out. If it was a 4 day tournament most novice and pretty good fisherman would have found the fishing difficult from Friday - Sunday but Tuesday???? Any fool could catch those same fish on Tuesday.

And the abundant food source is also short lived...with the exception of shad and herring fry but even that only lasts a short period of time. Even when there are shoals of them present people catch fish using baits that look nothinig May flies may hatch every night on some rivers but it doesn't last all night and the fish are still gonna eat the next morning and through out the next day. When schoolie bass are chasing shad fry they won't eat anything else....but there are 100 bass in a lake the size of Clark Hill that ain't chasing shad fry at the moment who are also going to eat something....its just the ones that are beating the water to a froth are easy to catch if you can match the hatch....but theres many more than them not beating the water to a froth. Fish have to eat to maintain their body weight and survive predation in order to spawn....that is the only reason they exist. They will indeed get lock jaw when they are pressured and will most assuredly feed exclusively on a specific food source while its available to them....but not all of them are doing the same thing all the time.

 

[GTMODawg]

I long for the days when the only things in my tackle box were a few pieces of terminal tackle, a floating Rebel, a bucktail, and a couple of plastic worms. Hardly ever got skunked.

I agree...and also long for the day when all the electronics I had on a boat was a super 60 flasher and didn't know how to use it beyond checking the depth! Fisherman and electronics today are like teenaged girls with their cell phones....they spend an inordinate amount of time staring at a monitor. It works, they catch a lot of fish....but folks used to catch a lot of fish simply fishing. All that scanning time could be fishing time if we wanted it to be.

I did just this a couple of weeks ago. I intentionally went to an area of a lake I was unfamiliar with and the goal was to find brushpiles and fish with electronics. I spent about 4 hours and did indeed find the things I was looking for....but had I just fished for those 4 hours I would have caught about as many fish. I even found I was having trouble triangulating a brush pile because I have grown so accustomed to simply touching a screen!

I fished with a friend of my stepdad when I was a kid who had a hook and line commercial grouper license in reddington beach. How did he find spots???? With an AM radio and a compass which may or may not have worked. He could position a boat with an AM radio, compensate for wind and tide and load the boat with grouper. Made a decent living at it. Couldn't have cared less for a graph which were available but expensive at the time.

Interestingly enough he also didn't care to catch big grouper because it took too long to get them to the boat. 5 pounders were the golden standard...if they weighed 10 he'd move. Fished Tom Mann Jelly worms, black, on a 3 oz jig head. Drive to a spot, position the boat, bounce that thing off a wreck and load the boat. Everyday.

Fisherman like to make fishing complicated and it can indeed be complicated but it can also be very easy and can be repeated time and again if you know what youre doing.

 

[Richf7]

Livers fished in high muddy water in the spring is about as sure fire a way to catch stripers and hybrids as there is....I have never caught a LM on a liver but back in the day when bait shops were bait shops and not convenience stores which happen to sell worms any bait shop worth trading with would have a bragging wall of polaroids of fish caught.....and heaping piles of big largemouth bass were caught on chicken livers by people fishing for catfish back then. Largemouth ain't changed since then...still lots of big bass caught by folks catfishing.

How do you secure chicken livers onto a hook?

 

[Dustin Pate]

How do you secure chicken livers onto a hook?

You'll hear of people using panty hose or floss to wrap them on the hook, but here is my preferred way.

I like to keep the livers on ice. I want them firm and fresh. I also cut them with an extremely sharp pair of kitchen shears. You don't need to choke them and a half dollar size piece is more than enough. An Eagle Claw bait holder in 1/0 is a good standard hook.

 

[Richf7]

You'll hear of people using panty hose or floss to wrap them on the hook, but here is my preferred way.

I like to keep the livers on ice. I want them firm and fresh. I also cut them with an extremely sharp pair of kitchen shears. You don't need to choke them and a half dollar size piece is more than enough. An Eagle Claw bait holder in 1/0 is a good standard hook.

Never tried this but thought it interesting.

 

[specialk]

Saw a guys years ago catching hybrids on eggs. He would get the one he caught, gut it,put some eggs on the hook and have another one on in just a few minutes. When he ran out of eggs he would gut another one. He musta had 30 fish by the time we left. He gave my boy some eggs and he hooked a huge hybrid in just a few minutes.

can't hide money!


p.s. couldn't resist...lol...

 

[Semi-Pro]

can't hide money!


p.s. couldn't resist...lol...

Took me more than a sec to figure that out

 

[Liquid nails]

If your not cut baiting for stripes you are missing out.

Last year, a week after I hung the one beast in the kayak that I didn’t weigh I hung another that was a touch over 46lbs. Cut bait.

 

[treadwell]

Fish must be pretty smart to make us use so many different methods to catch them which don’t always work for different people.

They are, they're in school their whole lives! (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

 

[Angel Eyes]

I would like to ask liquid nails how deep is the water usually that you fish your cut bait. Thanks in advance.

 

[Beehaw]

I don’t think the fish are near the purists that fisherman tend to be. They are trying to eat, to live another day.

 

[Big7]

If your not cut baiting for stripes you are missing out.

Last year, a week after I hung the one beast in the kayak that I didn’t weigh I hung another that was a touch over 46lbs. Cut bait.

That's getting it done.

We used to catch some big ones at Santee- Copper on cut and whole dead Bluebacks.

I just Catfish there now.

 

[Liquid nails]

I would like to ask liquid nails how deep is the water usually that you fish your cut bait. Thanks in advance.

Depends on the time of year and water temp. Spring fish as shallow as possible. Summer ends up being deep, but, I don’t exceed the 30-35’ range. Any deeper than that your chances of catching something big diminish. Fall I always fish deep sharp points close to deep water. Fall is tough. Fish scatter and could be anywhere on the lake.

I think I’ve said before but I don’t let my cut bait touch ice. I keep everything in a small Rubbermaid container inside my cooler. That’s the best piece of advice I can give anyone with cut bait. I’m convinced fish can smell the chlorine and who knows what else from the ice that soaks in your bait. They go from flopping at the bait shop into my container, then into my cooler.

 

[Gordon]

I have caught Hybrids and Stripes on Bluegill cutbait in the past. Does not have to be Herring/Shad if you have issues keeping them.