24 Sept 25, 2020 VOL.39 • ISS. 20
Fishing Glide Baits from Shore, Part 2
W
ay back in the 70’s when
I was young and broke, I
did a lot of shore fishing inside
the bay because, well,
gas was cheap and so
was I. I would take my
little tide book, check
when the incoming tide
would coincide with my
schedule, and head off
to Sierra Point, Oyster
Point, or any other of
the secret spotsI had in
mind.
Most of the time it
turned out to be casting
practice, but every once
in a while, I would hit the jackpot
and nab 20 or 30 stripers during the
tide.
Back then, there were no “glide
baits” as we know of them today,
thanks to our black bass fishing
cousins. Everything back then was
about getting the maximum action
we could get out of our lures, even
to the point of adding pork rind
strips, rubber skirts, or even bucktailed
treble hooks to our lures
since we felt that if some action is
FISH SNIFFER
COUNTRY
by Steve
“Hippo”Lau
good, more action is better. The
fact that we caught bunches of
stripers back then didn’t discourage
us from the practice
either.
As I am want to do,
after catching even more
fish on the same lures
and techniques again and
again, I was curious as to
whether I could go in the
opposite direction and still
catch fish. I wanted to
know if I could catch fish
with little or no action..
Taking the straight
bodied 5.5” floating Rebel
Minnow (the best selling plug for
stripers back then), I performed
two simple modifications to it; 1)
I drilled a very small hole in the
body and filled the hollow body
with water then sealed the hole,
and 2) I trimmed the lip down to
about 1/8”- 3/16” so that it would
have minimal impact on making it
wiggle.
Filling the lure with water
performed two very important
functions: out of the box, the lure
is a pain in the butt to cast. The
added water added a good amount
of weight which added distance
to the cast, and 2) It changed a
floating/diving lure into a very
slow sinking lure with almost st
neutral buoyancy. This afforded me
the ability to retrieve the lure much
more slowly than in its original
condition.
My thought process came across
thusly; observing fish, especially
bait fish in the water, I was always
fascination by how little effort
they used to swim when conditions
are non-threatening. My modified
Rebel was an attempt to mimic this
devil-may-care attitude of barely
gliding around oblivious to what
danger that might be lurking in
close proximity.
It would be far from the truth to
say this original glide bait didn’t
whack a bunch of unsuspecting
linesides. Almost as fun as catching
the fish was showing inquisitive
anglers that all I was throwing was
the good ol’ Rebel,they being far
enough away that they couldn’t
see the trimmed down lip,and of
course, that it was water filled.
They we amazed to see I could
cast my lure so much farther than
they could cast theirs, and then, in
trying to copy my retrieve speed,
my lure was under water and theirs
were creating wakes on the surface.
As good as that modified Rebel
Minnow fished, at best it could
only imitate anchovies, and
sometimes big stripers and halibut
want a healthy meal that only a
jacksmelt can provide, and that is
where the big glide baits will shine.
I haven’t tried a lot of these baits
(because they aren’t cheap and I
am!) but it is hard to beat out the
River2Sea S-Waver although I am
starting to use the Savage Gear
Glide Swimmer a little more, especially
in the Dirty Silver
Flash color.
OK, I’m not giving up all my
secrets for using these lures, but I
will let out that the most effective
way to use these lures is to cast
them as parallel to shore as you
can, no more than 20 degrees of
angle to the shore.
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