Video: How to make your lure stand out from the crowd

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I’ve delayed posting this week’s Fish Talk With The Doc video for a while now, waiting for an opportune time and boy, oh, boy, did I ever find it the other day.

I was fishing for lake trout, just before the season closes here in Northern Ontario at the end of the month. And I had a pretty good idea where the fish were staging, as I was fishing a favourite part of the lake, and a go-to structure that I’ve visited for nearly 50 years. But my heart skipped a beat when I turned on the Humminbird Helix 12, and spotted huge schools of ciscoes suspended out over the main lake basin, not far away from the rocky ledge where I knew the trout often set up to ambush dinner.

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Now, two important considerations: I was matching the hatch by offering the trout a variety of 4-, 5- and 6-inch-long soft-plastic ciscoe lookalikes. But I was also making my bait stand out from the crowd. That is, there were so many thousands of silvery foot-long herring swimming around that I had to do something different to attract and trigger the fish.

I caught the first trout after I noticed that the baitfish were concentrated in about 35 to 40 feet of water, even though the main lake depths they were swimming over were often twice that deep. So I alternated retrieving my paddletails slightly above, and slightly below those defining depths. Working the top layer, however, didn’t pay off. But when I counted down and swam my swimbait through the 45-foot level… bingo! Fish on.

I also noticed that the schools of ciscoes were constantly moving. One moment I’d look down at the screen and see dozens of marks, and then a few seconds later it would be as empty as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. That’s when the light went on, and I had the brilliant idea (they do occur me sometimes) that I should hover my lure perfectly still, without moving it at all, in the middle of the water column. And this made it stand out from the crowd like a sore thumb. I mean, it must have looked like a lost child, standing alone, in a vacant parking lot, crying for its mother. The rest, as they say, is history. 

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There are, of course, many other ways you can make your bait or lure stand out from the crowd, as I discuss in this week’s Fish Talk With The Doc.  I hope you enjoy watching it.

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