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WOLLITZ: New Year’s offers a good time to get in the red
Three simple ideas dominate my preparation for the 2019 fishing year: cut back, organize and see red.
I’m not big on new year resolutions – or I’d be slim and fit, for sure – but I do like to get a fresh start once the holidays have passed. That’s especially so with my fishing gear.
After parking the BassCat in November, I lugged rods, reels and lures to the basement for off-season maintenance. The big tasks like cleaning and oiling reels and swabbing out the gunk that accumulates in my rods’ guides have been completed.
Now it’s time for the fun stuff. Time to sort and reduce the gear that will go back to the boat and to dabble with color to make my lures even more irresistible.
The past few work sessions in my fishing shop have been dedicated to sorting through the lures that I removed from the boat after nearly eight months of busy fishing trips.
It seems that I unload more baits in the fall than I stowed on the boat in the spring. How can that be? Bass chew through many pounds of plastics during the season and I always lose some lures to snags, broken lines and snaggle-toothed northern pike and muskies.
The storage boxes and bags, nevertheless, are bulging at year’s end. They are jumbled thanks to the effects of frenetic searches when the action is hot and less-than-careful efforts to return them to their proper places at the end of each day’s fishing.
Sorting and organizing is necessary before the 100 pounds or so of my lures are returned to the boat’s lockers. My goal each winter is to reduce the weight of my arsenal by half. I never make weight, but I keep trying.
It also is fun to customize lures. Our lakes see tons of fishing pressure and we anglers all buy the same lures from Fin Feather Fur, Gander, Dick’s and Bass Pro Shops. It stands to reason that anything I’m throwing is highly likely to have been thrown by many others.
Fish are not as smart as some would have us believe, but they do have a strong survival instinct and can become conditioned to avoid situations that present danger. Chief among them is trying to eat a lure that previously bit them.
For that reason, I try to make changes so my baits don’t look like standard issue. One of my favorite tweaks is adding red streaks and splashes.
I paint the shanks of my crankbaits’ belly-mounted treble hooks. My intent is to mimic a stream of blood coming from a wounded baitfish, thus helping sell the idea that the lure is easy pickings to a predator fish.
I believe the red shanks help seal the deal. But I do not add red color to the trailing hook, because I want the fish to zero in on the front.
I don’t keep numbers to prove the bleeding look works, but I can tell you I fish them more confidently and notice a lot of my fish have hit the bait aggressively enough to get the leading hook and its red shank. So I’m sold it’s worth the effort.
I also paint splashes of red on the flanks of crankbaits and on the willowleaf blades of spinnerbaits. My intent again is to give the appearance of blood to trigger the game fishes’ instincts to prey on wounded and vulnerable baitfish.
Another trick with color involves tinkering with my braided lines. With Sharpie pens, I color the braid with dark green, brown and black to help camouflage them so they are not visible to fish attracted to the baits they are dragging.
For me, the time is well spent, as the hours I invest now certainly will add fish to my tally later this year.