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Print versionTrolling lures, the basics 2
Nick Drakes, a Trolling Lure manufacturer and owner of Sekard Technology finishes his two part series on the basics of rigging Big Game Trolling Lures.
KEEP IT ON THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW!
How should a lure swim? There are a myriad of lures with wildly varying swimming actions. Some have absolutely crazy actions, splashing madly on the surface or swimming aggressively from side to side or just acting like something that has taken too many banned substances! Others just zip along quietly, with no fuss.
Which type should we use? The basic answer is that we should use the ones that create the maximum disturbance in the water, as these will have the greatest ability to grab a fish's attention. This is correct in principle, but we must then introduce another factor essential to the pursuit of big game species. We all want to catch billfish, whether they be Marlin, Sailfish or whatever. Billfish often show themselves to be incredibly incompetent predators. When I see a Marlin or Sailfish slashing wildly at a bait or lure, and failing to catch it, I am always amazed that they do not starve to death, let alone grow to their large size!!! A Marlin or Sailfish has a long bill at the front of its head and eyes at the sides. They always remind me of a chicken trying to pick up a grain of corn. The bird will look with one eye, then the other eye and it will then take an educated guess as to where to peck. Sometimes it hits the spot and sometimes it doesn't! Marlin and Sailfish are sometimes much the same in their accuracy and ability! The way I interpret this is that we should avoid using lures with wild or aggressive swimming actions. These qualities may be excellent for grabbing the attention of a passing predator but they also make it very difficult for it to catch and eat. Also, remember that all predators are lazy; they will eat whatever is easiest to catch, so make it easy for them with your choice of lure! In essence, pick a lure that creates plenty of noise and disturbance in the water but which has a generally straight swimming action - no wild side to side deviations.
 Left to Right: Angled Head, Straight Head, Scooped Head |
One possible exception to this rule is if you intend to select a lure to run as a teaser. Namely, a lure with no hooks that is used purely to draw fish into the spread or to attract them close to the boat so that you can pitch a natural bait or cast a fly to them. Teasers can be as wild and crazy as you like, because you don't want the fish to actually eat them, just get really angry!
DOWN AND DIRTY
If we want to make it easy for the fish to eat the lure (which we do, of course) it is preferable for the lure to spend at least part of its swimming cycle under the water.
There are some styles of lure that run predominantly on (or very close to) the surface of the water. These lures often look very spectacular; they move a lot of water and certainly do a good job of attracting fish, but they are not so easy for the fish eat. Lures with heads that have very sharply angled faces and little or no taper in them are often intended to run in this way and this is why I prefer to avoid them.
For a large predator, such as Marlin, to eat a lure that is running right on the surface it is necessary for it to lift part of its head and body out of the water. They will certainly do so without hesitation, but we want to make it as easy as possible for the fish to engulf the lure. The more we make the fish jump through hoops to get hold of its meal the greater the probability that the fish will miss and we will fail to get the hook-up.
To achieve good reliable hook-ups, and fish-friendly dining qualities, it is difficult to beat what I regard as the classic lure action. This is where the lure comes to the surface, creates a nice splash and throws plenty of water around, then dives down while leaving a long dense stream of fine bubbles in its wake (called the smoke trail). After reaching the lowest point of its swimming action, it then rises back to the surface and repeats the cycle. Ideally the lure should have a nice tight wiggle as it dives (but no wild swimming actions) and it should get down to a depth of between one and two feet below the surface. The deeper the better within this range, but most lures do not get much more than a foot below the surface. Those that do get well down tend to be the very large and heavy monster marlin lures. As long as the lure is reaching a reasonable depth at some point in its swimming cycle then we are giving the fish the best possible opportunity to eat the lure cleanly.
Pick a lure that has this general type of swimming action and you will catch fish reliably and with no fuss. You may not see quite so many fish thrashing around behind the boat desperately trying to nail your lure, but you will get a much higher percentage of the wham, bam thank you mam type of strike. These are the ones where the first thing you know about the fish is when the outrigger clip flies open and the reel screams, no flailing bills, no thrashing the water to foam, just a clean strike and positive hook-up.
 Smokin, Smoke Trails |
It is a generally held view that one of the most important features of any big game trolling lure is the smoke trail that it creates. The smoke trail is the long trail of bubbles that is created by the lure as it travels through the water and goes through its swimming cycle.
I will go one step further and suggest that the smoke trail is the single most important feature that a lure can have. Why do I think this? Well the first thing a lure must do is attract the attention of the large predatory fish that we are trying to catch. The smoke trail can be absolutely huge when compared with the size of the lure itself and this serves to create an incredibly large and intense visual stimulation for any predators in the area.
So, how do we achieve this vitally important smoke trail? In principle it's very easy; pull any blunt faced object through the water at speed and it will create lots of bubbles and disturbance. Where the skill of the lure maker comes into play is to focus and intensify the trail of bubbles so as to create a "smoke trail". What we really want to achieve is a long, unbroken and dense stream of tiny bubbles, not an intermittent burst of large bubbles. The smoke trail effect that these tiny bubbles create provides the attention grabbing visual stimulation that we need. Think of it like the vapour trail you see behind jet airliners as they fly by at 30,000 feet. I bet when you look up into the sky you usually see the vapour trail first and then follow it along to find the tiny aircraft at its head?! If that plane was up there with no vapour trail you would often look up and never know that a plane was there!
For decades the world's lure makers have toiled endlessly to perfect their art and have focused enormous attention on the design of the lure heads. The size, shape and subtle detailing of the lure head has a huge bearing on how it behaves in the water and particularly on the smoke trail the lure creates. As mentioned much earlier in this article, the head of the lure is its "engine"; it is the driving force behind how the lure works. To give two extreme examples: a streamlined bullet or missile shaped lure head will create far less disturbance and fewer bubbles than a broad blunt faced or scooped face lure - common sense again really!
To digress slightly; streamlined bullet type lures have their place, particularly in reducing drag when high speed trolling or when conditions and species dictate that the lures are run continually sub-surface. They are also a good choice for downrigger fishing, a popular and effective method for Wahoo for example. In general though, when targeting surface feeding big game species, we should aim for a good strong bubble trail and a lure with some form of blunt or scooped face is what we need to do the business.
The type of lures that we are going to select will generally have blunt, slightly angled or scooped out faces. These key features will provide the starting point for a good smoke trail. The lure maker will then have fine tuned the more subtle features of the lure head including angles, tapers, edges and chamfers to perfect the action that he (or she) has aimed for.
Now we enter into different territory - the lure skirts. Most of the worlds lure makers pay little or no attention to the skirts they fit to their lures in terms of their possible contribution to the smoke trail. To most manufacturers and anglers the skirts are there to stabilise the head, provide bulk and add colour. It is normal practice to supply lures fitted with smooth and shiny vinyl skirts, often called octopus skirts or squid skirts and recognisable to UK anglers as giant muppets. These can look great, with wonderful vivid colour schemes, but they do absolutely nothing to help with the smoke trail. They are so smooth and slick that they just zip through the water, looking pretty but doing little else.
But the skirts can do so much more and can have a very positive effect on the creation and control of the smoke trail and the overall performance of the lure. My company, Sekard Technology, manufacture our own unique and patented skirt system that we call Smoke Tails. These skirts have a specially textured surface moulded into each individual tentacle. This texture allows the skirt to make a positive contribution to the way the lure performs, particularly with regard to the smoke trail and the level of disturbance and vibration emitted into the water. Vibration is another incredibly important and effective quality that will stimulate predators and draw their attention to the presence of the lure.
Now I am not saying go out and buy my lures or skirts (though I will be delighted if you do!) but what I do want you to do is to pay attention to the skirts fitted to your lures and not just to the head of the lure. Back in the early days of lure making, modern octopus skirts did not exist. A variety of materials were used to skirt lures, ranging from rubber tyre inner tube to natural fish skins, but a very popular material was upholstery vinyl. Some of the worlds top big game crews still use this material on some of their lures and I think they do it with good reason! Upholstery vinyl often has an embossed surface (typically leather grained) and the vinyl is mounted onto a fabric backing. Both the embossed surface and fabric backing add texture to the skirts and undoubtedly help with the smoke trail and vibration. This probably isn't quite to the extent that our Smoke Tails do, but certainly better than the super slick octopus skirts.
 A selection of big game lures |
One of the great discussion topics in angling is the importance of colour. Can fish see colour? Does lure or bait colour make a difference? I'll be a little controversial here and say that in the big game fishing context, I don't think that lure colour really matters at all! Maybe that is a little too sweeping, but I am convinced that most of us get far too hung up with the colour schemes that our lures carry.
Many lures are available with an amazing choice of beautiful and highly detailed skirt colours. These attempt to accurately replicate a particular prey fish in terms of colours, stripes, bars, and scale patterns. I am not sure that this carries any weight in the world of the Marlin or Tuna. These fish are a little different to a wild brown trout (for example) which may be sipping down a mayfly on a chalkstream. The trout will study the insect carefully and any sign that something is just not quite right and it will spook and turn away. Our big game friends exist in a very fast, aggressive and competitive environment. They are the rock stars of the fish world and they live the same way! I have not yet seen a Marlin swim up to a lure, carefully examine its details and then either gently sip it down or turn away in fear. Different attitude all together!
Okay, so complex and detailed colour schemes are a waste of time. But what does matter in the world of colour? In my opinion it is best to focus just on the very basics of colour, shade and contrast. Listen to experienced big game crews and they are likely to say something like I need a dark colour? or I need a light colour or I need a bright colour, you won't usually hear complex requests for highly detailed colour schemes.
One very useful feature that will certainly attract universal agreement from most big game crews is that the lure should have the ability to exhibit shine and flash in the water. Most prey species will give out highly visible and often iridescent flash in the water and this is undoubtedly a major attractor to the predators that are hunting them. Lure manufacturers typically address this issue by incorporating reflective materials within the heads of their lures and this most probably provides a highly beneficial effect.
You can get involved with the idea of trying to match the hatch, much as I described when discussing lure sizes. If you have only a single available prey species in the area at the time and you know that your target fish species are feeding on them, then it probably makes sense to base your colour scheme around that particular baitfish and run several lures of all the same colour. Just as with lure size, this scenario doesn't often happen and probably wouldn't be wise, even if it did. Generally it is safest to run a mixed spread of lure colours just as we may run a mixed spread of lure sizes.
Colour choice will vary a little in different parts of the world, but if I am trying to cover all the bases I have a set range of basic colours that I employ. I certainly wouldn't take any credit for choosing these colours, they are pretty much industry standards and they seem to work.
My first lure, on the short corner, (closest to the boat) will usually be black and the next lure back, in the long corner, will be purple. On the short rigger I will have a predominantly blue colour and on the long rigger the lure will be green. The fifth lure, in the shotgun position, will usually duplicate whichever colour I think will be the hot colour for the day or, alternatively, I will use that lure to chop and change just to see if lure colour has any influence.
What you must NOT do is to constantly chop and change your full spread of lures, looking for a magic formula, because I guarantee you won't find one. Every time you bring the lures in to change them you reduce the time they are in the water and hence the chances of getting a strike.
My advice is to pick basic proven colour combinations, get your spread of lures running nicely and leave them there. Forget about trying to match every scale and stripe of the local bait fish and just sit back, enjoy the scenery and work on your tan! Believe me, the fish won't care.
SOME CONCLUSIONS
Those of you who didn't manage to trawl (or should that be troll?!) through my earlier ramblings, may wish to consider the following key points when picking your next spread of trolling lures:
- Pick lure sizes that are generally appropriate to the prey or bait fish present in the area.
- If there is no one dominant prey species, then run a mixed spread of lure sizes.
- Don't go mad with lure size, they can be too large, even when targeting very large predators.
- Run your largest lures closest to the boat and your smallest lures farthest away.
- Pick lures that have the ability to create plenty of noise, disturbance, vibration and smoke, but which do not have ridiculously wild swimming actions.
- Don't become too obsessed with colour. Base your lures around the fundamental colours of black, purple, blue and green. By all means add some contrasting colour features, but don't worry about trying to match every stripe, spot and scale.
- Keep it simple and use your common sense.
If you'd like to raise any questions or seek clarification on any points within this article, feel free to contact me at on the Sekard Technology website at www.sekard.com
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