One bait days

[Red Childress]

Back in Feb. of '05, I was musky trolling with some professional walleye guys (with air temps of 8 degrees) and we were trying to pattern the fish for that day. We were all using different types of Perchbaits and the action was slow for the first hour or so but I knew we were on fish but they just would not move for us. We hit all my hotspots doing the same thing I had been doing for the past 9 weeks. Finally, one of the guys wanted to try trolling with the current instead of moving slowly against it while picking apart the bottom structure, so we did. By going with the current, we had to increase our speed to 2.5 to 2.7 mph (water temp was 32.1 and ice chunks were floating by) which I thought was too fast but at the time we had nothing to loose except our frozen appendages.

The very first pass we hit a fish on a purple shad perchbait which happened to be on my rod. I immediately traded that bait to one of the other guys and we began trolling with the current again and we hit another fish. The guy took off the same perchbait and gave it to the 3rd guy and he hit another fish within 30 minutes or so. Those 2 guys kept switching baits back and forth until we had netted 7 fish in 5.5 hours on the same bait and while going "with the current". It was the only color/style that was working and until that day, I had never seen a single bait be the only hot bait in the boat when chasing muskies. Our rods were in our hands to allow us to "contour" troll big submerged humps by letting line out/reeling line in to keep our baits just off bottom.

Since my boat in a "casting machine" 95 percent of the time, patterning fish is a much slower process but on that trolling day, it took us about an hour to figure things out. I often wonder how many fish we could have netted that day if we had not been so damn cold and finally quit before dark.

Has anyone else ever experienced those "one bait days"??

[Anzomcik]

I can not say i have had a one bait days for musky, but have had then for pike.

Also kinda related to your story, we had a two bait summer trolling. It seemed like the musky only wanted these two baits all summer, one day the one was hot and another day the other was hot but we could not catch a fish on any other bait besides these two (trolling that it).

Also never had much luck trolling against the current, almost all our fish came with going with the flow.

[Ivan]

Most days we get multiple trolling fish in our boat, there are one or two hot lures. I am usually able to find another bait that works when one gets hot. I usually try to find a bait that is a similar color to the hot one, but not exactly the same. I don't usually have success with multiple lures that are the exact same.

One day on St Clair, we caught a bunch of fish, but the last four, just at dark, were unusual. We caught and released 4 muskies within 15 minutes. They were all on the same exact bait on an outside board rod. We would catch a fish, release it, and as soon as I could get that bait back in the water and out the planer board line, it would immediately get hit again. None of the other rods ever got touched during those last fish.

Another day, at the Kawarthas, we fished until afternoon without a strike. Most of the lures I run at the Kawarthas are Wileys. I had been changing colors of Wileys and finally put out a black and silver Wiley. Same body size and style as many of the others I tried that day. We ended up releasing 11 fish that day before dark, all off that one lure. Some of that may have been the time of day (feeding window)...it's hard to tell for sure but I'm sure the color had something to do with it.

Obviously, I think color is very important.

Red, I am surprised that you caught those fish on that one bait, while changing the rod position of the bait. That is one thing I would never do. I understand why you did it though...you were holding your rods and wanted other people to catch fish also. I think the position of where the bait is in your trolling spread can be as important as the lure and color. Maybe it's some of my salmon fishing experience, but when trolling multiple lines (4 or more rods), I think alot about the "group dynamic". In other words, what baits are positioned where, and what the fish see as a group when my boat passes over them.

[Red Childress]

I thought the same thing when we hit that first fish. We were running 2 straights and 1 jointed to start things off and I had the jointed purple Perchbait which was about 10-12 feet behind the straight models because I was sitting in the back of the boat steering the tiller which put me even further behind in the spread. After we all switched to jointed baits, the purple one still was hot and caught all the fish.

I normally hold my rod tip higher than my clients to get my lure behind the rest when doing the contour trolling stuff but there was so much ice floating that day I had to stay in tight and dodge chunks (submerging the rod tip) which put all our baits closer together.

Strange stuff for sure.

[toothyfishman]

This year was my first trip to St. Clair, the place is amazing to start with!

We were running one of the new plastic tuff shads in the blue shad I guess it's called and it was getting hit. I had another same color so put it out as well. There was something special about the first one because I tried everything I could think of to prove it wasn't the lure itself. Changed boat position, changed the line out, sides of the boat, and finally took the thing off and switched the lures to each others rods, total flip flop.
Finally when it was all said and done and we had proved it HAD to be the lure I put it back on the drivers side of the boat. My partners like....sure, back on your side.....I'm like, heck yes! We are taking turns on fish so it doesn't matter one bit but it's easier to net fish off that side so it needs to be there.

The magic little blue tuff I'll bet caught almost 1/2 out fish that week.
The other blue may have caught 5-6 fish.

Sure there was days and areas that other colors were working better but as soon as the blue was working that lure was awesome!

Even the sturgeon we snagged and battle for an hour was on it! Even though it didn't hit it.....ha ha....I was sick worrying we loose my magic little tuff.
By the end of the week the lure looked like 3-4 seasons old with teeth marks and scratches.
So that was color and lure when blue was a hot color.
Even when other colors were "on" my blue tuff was still out there and holding his own on days his color wasn't the best to use.

Does it have some special action? Not sure but I sure have a soft spot in my heart for that little blue tuff, we had many laughs together that week!!!
We'll be teaming up again this coming year again!!!!