![]() ![]() The bait was still there, we read it a'plenty on the sonar, just no predatory fluke. I never really did get to the bottom of that disastrous situation. Fluke would usually be my wife's frying pan.Īnd then, seemingly out of nowhere, the local fish aggregation patterns changed - the open bottom drops that I had KILLED them on for many seasons suddenly went dry - all Summer long, too. The near-hypnotic rhythmic bending of the rod was highly satisfying (like watching a properly fished bunker spoon - bounce, bounce, bounce, etc.), and if we saw a fish hit the rod and miss, then we would grab the rod out of the holder and a quick couple of sharp jig motions with the rod tip were normally enough to re-interest the fish. ![]() When the rod bent over, pick it up out of the rod holder and reel in the fish. The natural rocking action of the boat normally did a fine job of "jigging" the bucktail. The way we used to fish the rig was to drop it in, let it hit bottom, pay out 20-40' of line and then put the rod in the rod holder. ![]() Hey, "the baloney stops at the fillet table," right? What a revelation! They began imitated my rig and hence started pulling much better fish, without the constant irritation of having to remove curled-up skates from their rigs. The proof was in the catchin', right? I can't even say how many "gift rigs" I gave out to the formerly critical "experts" in my marina. The non-believing infidels changed their tune quickly when we would return with our cooler loaded with nice fish. "Whatcha fishin for, Sea Bass?" or "That's no way to catch a fluke!" or "Everybody knows you need a long leader and a squid strip and killie for fluke" and my personal favorite: "That rig sucks, you ain't catchin' fluke with that thing." In fact I regularly got laughed at mornings at the dock as I loaded my fluke rods onto the boat and my dock mates spied the B/S Rigs clipped onto them. But back 25 or more years ago, no one, and I mean NO ONE seriously fished for fluke this way. These days, so-called "Popcorn" rigs and the like are pretty much accepted as THE way to catch fluke. Here, take a look at the rig's first iteration: A strip of fish bait or a few spearing completed the deal, and that rig just killed it for better than 20 years over the open bottom. Well, in truth it is a bit of a "smart-assy" name, but the idea was to have the sinker square on the bottom, while a small (1/2 oz or less) bucktail was tied off on a dropper loop, approx. So the name " Bucktail/ Skateless" or "B/S" seemed appropriate. Those of you who have read my stuff over the years, going back to the "old" site, know that I've frequently mentioned doing all my fluking with my B/S Rig, but there are still a goodly group of readers that do not know what that is.įirst, let's get this out of the way - I named it "B/S," not because its a Bull Sh!t idea, rather because I developed it specifically to fish small bucktails over a sinker, so to avoid the super-ridiculous numbers of skates that infest our local South Shore ocean open bottom. ![]()
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