Winged jigs and flat baits. Flat bait fishing with a “rag”
We continue our traditional column Tips from experienced fishermen - we take an unusual bait and experiment:
Little-knowing fishermen only know baits such as worms, maggots and bloodworms, and, I must say, they get by quite well with them, catching a lot of fish. Yes, in some reservoirs this is enough, but sometimes the fish refuses to take the usual bait, and something new needs to be presented on the hook. This is where little-known attachments come to the rescue.
May beetle - Khrushch
Khrushchev is a small beetle that makes a characteristic sound when flying. It appears at the beginning of summer. At this time, the beetle eats the young foliage of trees. The female beetle burrows into loose soil and lays eggs.
It is convenient to catch beetles in the evening with a gauze net. Early in the morning, sleeping May beetles can be shaken off the trees.
Khrushchev larvae are searched for in the turf at a depth of 10-15 cm. Rooks, who themselves are not averse to eating Khrushchev, sometimes help to find their habitat.
Another excellent bait is the mole cricket - an excellent attachment for fishing with a bottom fishing rod. large fish(catfish, chub). Due to ignorance of how to get this bait, many anglers don’t even know about it.
The mole cricket is a large insect up to 6 cm long, yellowish-brown in color. Lives in the upper layers of greenery, in vegetable gardens, orchards, along the banks of rivers and ditches. The mole cricket can dig holes up to 80 cm deep, where it sits during the day and crawls out at night. Look for mole crickets in manure, in garden heaps of rotted garbage, in rotted sawdust, where clay is prepared.
Small holes with a diameter of up to 10 mm can be seen on the surface. This is the first sign of a mole cricket's habitat. Carefully dig out the soil and remember that the holes can be very deep.
The bear should be stored in sawdust in a cool place. You can feed with herb roots. Catfish bite well on mole crickets.
The steppe cricket is a good bait for barbel, chub, carp, ide and rudd. There are two known types of crickets: gray and black. The gray cricket lives under clods of plowed soil and under heaps of weeds. It is good as bait, but small. The black cricket is slightly larger than the gray one. It is found in burrows in meadows, near rivers, and often in clearings. Where there are crickets, you can see many burrows.
Caterpillars are the larvae of butterflies.
Look for urticaria caterpillars in nettle thickets, wastelands, and currant thickets. During the day, the caterpillars crawl along the surface of the leaves, and at night - under the leaf, on its underside. Cabbage plants are collected from cabbage in vegetable gardens.
You can store the caterpillars in a three-liter jar, tied with gauze so that the larvae do not crawl out. Place a few leaves of the plants from which they were collected into the jar. It is better to remove droppings and change leaves.
For bait, you can use a large forest ant. They collect ants from anthills in the forest. Do not tear up the entire anthill under any circumstances! It is enough to stir the edge of the anthill with a stick - the ants will crawl out to repair their shelter. Grab them here - along with the pine needles. It is better to keep ants in a tight bag. It’s better not to prepare for future use. Rudd and ide are good for catching on ants.
Horseflies often interfere with fishing - they land on all exposed parts of the body and bite painfully. However, horse flies can also be used as bait. Carefully catch it and place it on the hook across your chest. Horseflies can be caught both from the surface and in mid-water.
GADDY AND ITS LARVA
The gadfly is an insect that can be confused with a horsefly. Usually they catch it not on an insect, but on its larva. Female gadflies lay eggs under the skin of the animal, where they develop into larvae. Bodfly larvae can be obtained at slaughterhouses, and they should be kept in a glass jar with sand and bran.
Carp fish are excellently caught using the botfly larva.
Mealworm beetles appear in late summer. The mealworm is found in mills, in flour warehouses, and in bags of flour.
The larva is brown-yellow, up to 20 mm in size. The period of its development is 1 year. It feeds on flour and grains.
Mealworm - good nozzle for catching peaceful fish - roach, silver bream, crucian carp.
The wasp larva is used to catch non-predatory fish. In summer it may be larger. They look for this larva on the shore of the reservoir, watching where the wasps fly, and catch it late in the evening, when the wasps return to their nest. It is not safe to collect larvae during the day. The honeycombs are collected in a basket, covered with a lid, and at home the larvae are selected and placed in a dry, clean jar.
Many fishermen do not recognize tadpoles as bait. Some fishermen believe that the tadpole is a seasonal bait for fishing in the spring. However, it is not.
It's better to fish with a tadpole float rod into the wiring, releasing the tadpole 10 cm from the bottom.
BUKARA
Bukara is a brown water beetle larva with two semicircular jaws and three ends on its tail. Bukara lives in running water with a sandy bottom.
They extract it, like bloodworms, and store it in a tightly closed box in damp sawdust. You can feed bukara with algae - this way you can preserve it all winter.
Bukara is an excellent bait for catching perch, roach, and bream. It has a durable shell, so it stays on the hook for a long time.
Chicken, duck and goose giblets are very good bait, especially for catfish.
They catch you with your guts bottom gear. You can even feed fish with intestines.
Not everyone knows that fish can be caught for the meat of warm-blooded animals. For example, cubes or strips are cut out of the liver and placed on a hook.
It's better to fish from the bottom. The hook catches pike perch, perch, burbot, ide, and catfish. Don't forget that meat attachments wash out quickly, so they need to be changed more often.
Wrap the clotted blood in a rag and bury it in the ground for a day. The blood will become tight, such that it can be cut into pieces. You can catch ide well with blood on a donk. It is useful to feed the fish at the fishing site with small pieces of the same blood.
Smoked lard is an effective autumn and winter bait. Small chopped cubes are placed on the hook.
Smaller cubes are used for floating bait. For fishing, choose a high-quality, fatty layer, and not lard sprouted with meat.
Don’t forget that lard is lighter than water, so when bottom fishing, you can add more lard to the leash.
Take a roach (or other small fish) and cut off a piece of meat along with its scales from its side surface. Place this bait and confidently catch a perch.
If a mouse gets caught in a mousetrap, do not rush to throw it away. It can be useful when fishing for catching large catfish. Burbot and pike may also be caught.
Introduction
The first time I observed a fish feeding on something from the surface of the water was in my distant childhood, when I was visiting my relatives living in North Ossetia. Then we all went together, in a friendly crowd, so to speak, to swim in the Terek River. This fast mountain stream, of course, bore little resemblance to the majestically flowing Don or the endless Volga, but still, among the many riffles and seething whirlpools, one could find quite a decent place to relax. It's true that you won't be able to swim in a race there, but you'll always be welcome to jump backwards on the slippery rocks.
The main trouble that I had to experience on the shore was heaps of insects, the most vile and bloodthirsty of which were gadflies. These buzzing creatures gnawed at my fragile child’s body so much that I almost cried, sadly remembering my own mosquitoes, which were the only “biting” insects in my home. Having killed another vile reptile, I threw it into the waters of the fast Terek. And imagine my surprise when this hefty fly in a matter of seconds ended up in the mouth of some fish unknown to me.
This shocked my imagination so much that I immediately, forgetting about the pain, began to look forward to the next gadfly swooping down on my arm or chest. I never found out what kind of fish were hiding in the depths of the Terek, but I finally understood for myself that the fish not only swims along the bottom, but can also be caught from the surface of the reservoir.
After that, I often saw on television how foreign fishermen, dressed in clean and colorful clothes, deftly throw strange gear far into the water, using multi-colored artificial baits called “flies” as bait. From TV screens, smiling guys told me about the advantages of fly fishing, boasted about their unusual gear, which even had strange names - not a rod, but a form; not a fishing line, but a cord and so on.
They even make their “flies” mainly by hand, turning their work into a kind of cult. The materials they use to make their baits are unlikely to be purchased in a regular store - the wool of rare animals, feathers of exotic birds, sinews of animals listed in the Red Book, and the like. Even then I thought - I can’t live like this. But how can I or any other average fisherman be worse than overdressed imported masters?
Tackle
That’s when I decided to simplify the fly fishing process itself to an acceptable scale. Why spend money on expensive tackle and flies when you can use the fishing gear we are used to?
A regular fishing rod is enough spinning reel and several thin but reliable hooks. We mount the gear as usual. The only condition is that the fishing line should not exceed a diameter of 0.15 mm. To prevent it from immediately starting to sink after being thrown into the water, I recommend lubricating it with paraffin or the fat of waterfowl - geese or ducks, as it has good water-repellent properties. We knit the hook directly to the main line, bypassing leashes, snap hooks, winding rings and other “gadgets” that can load the tackle.
Fishing technique
Naturally, it is not possible to cast a tackle weighted only with a hook and bait far. However, even here you can find a way out by using a piece of a twig or tree bark as a kind of load. Having previously split the piece of wood, insert a fishing line into it. It turns out to be a kind of nondescript float, which should be moved away from the hook by about a meter. Now the bait can be thrown a fairly decent distance. You ask: “Why can’t you use a regular float?” Why can't it? To your health.
It’s just that a familiar piece of wood floating serenely on the surface of a reservoir can scare the fish less than the most inconspicuous and inconspicuous, in your opinion, float. In addition, a piece of wood will perfectly serve as a bite alarm. By the way, you can also use a cork from a wine bottle.
Nozzle
Naturally, it must be floating and preferably of animal origin. Of course, you can use bread crusts, they also have a certain reserve of buoyancy, but you will wait a long time for a serious fish to bite on such bait and to no avail. Most likely, you will manage to collect small things from all over the reservoir around your bait. It’s also not worth using the usual worms, maggots or bloodworms - your bait will simply pull the entire tackle under water. You'll have to sweat and catch live grasshoppers, flies, gadflies, horse flies, beetles and other nasty things.
Immediately before casting, it is advisable to spread the wings of the insect so that it better floats on the surface of the water. Of course, ideally it would be for the bait to remain alive, but a dead fly is quite capable of coping with the work assigned to it.
Conclusion
That, in principle, is all the wisdom. With such a simple tackle you can successfully catch chub, ide, carp, crucian carp, rudd and other non-predatory fish. But even toothy hunters, such as pike, perch, asp and the like, will not miss a tempting horsefly or grasshopper swimming right above their nose. Well, as they say, no tail, no scales.
It turns out that the color red on an artificial bait has the same effect on pike as the proverbial red rag on a bull. Thus, to bring the pike to a state of crazy biting, you just need to offer it a red artificial bait. A company of red "tempters". A very catchy brush is made of fluffy marabou feathers, which begin to play seductively in the water.
To do this, several feathers are cut out of marabou skin, placed on a tee and tied to it with a red thread. To avoid empty bites, the feathers should be trimmed a little more so that the tee tips remain open. The tee should not be hooked onto the rod ring, as shown in the photo, but only onto the frame of the ring, so as not to scratch the insert!
Pike loves red. There is hardly a wobbler, oscillating or rotating spoon that does not contain splashes of red to one degree or another. So why does this color make her so irritated? What is this - the illusion of a wounded, bleeding fish that may turn out to be an easy prey? In shallow bodies of water, where the sun's rays penetrate to a depth of three meters, this may well be the case.
But then, how can one explain that they catch red at a depth of over 20 m, where pike can no longer perceive this color? Only one thing is clear: the red spots on the bait make it more attractive to pike. Even such legendary lures as the old Effzett spinner, the ABU-Hilo Redhead wobbler or the Morrum spinner don't go to work without red or orange spots. How “pros” fish in extreme conditions in the mountains information -
A catchy red tint can be given to any artificial bait using a fairly simple remedies. There are days when the pike turns into an indecisive pursuer - the predator follows the bait at a safe distance until the angler pulls it out of the water. After this, it very slowly sinks to depth again. What is this? Either the pike is full and is just showing curiosity, or it already knows your model of spoon and senses danger.
So what can you do to encourage a lure-baited pike to bite? I had good luck with a red twister or a red plastic fin attached to the tee of a spoon. You can buy fins in a specialized retail chain or make them yourself. To do this, simply cut out “fins” approximately 3 cm long and 1 cm wide from a red plastic jar, for example a yogurt cup, with scissors.
A heated needle makes a hole through which it is inserted into the winding ring. The purpose of the fin is to make the pike see the red and attack the spoon. You might as well put a red twister on the tee hook.
More red. Another way to make a catchy spinner is to decorate the tee with a tassel of red or orange feathers. To do this, in a specialized store for fly fishers, you need to buy a skin with a dyed feather of a rooster or marabou, cut pieces from it with scissors and tie it to a tee with a thread.
At the same time, you need to ensure that the stings of the hooks remain open, which will allow them to be securely caught in the bony pike’s mouth. Some creative anglers even decorate their spinnerbaits or silicone minnows with a waterproof red marker. Well, they often get more bites as a reward for this. On many spinners, red tassels on the tee are included in the standard set, which attracts beautiful pikes.
My main testing ground for testing new baits and systems was and still is... the bathtub! Fifteen years ago, while studying in Berlin, I visited a local fishing store for the first time and accidentally met a fellow countryman there. During his time in Kyiv, Igor was involved in fishing, and we even had mutual friends. He helped me get documents for fishing, and for several years he became my main partner, and in many ways, my teacher in spinning fishing. Igor was fond of fishing with wobblers - we raced all the models he bought, as well as the ones he made, in the bathroom, varying the speed of the retrieve and various ways animation. My first attempts at making baits and systems with my own hands also date back to this period.
I didn’t get carried away with wobbler construction, but the bathtub forever became a faithful friend in testing my designs. In particular, from the first test samples I tried to bathe them in combination with various silicone baits. It was in the bathroom that the patterns of combination were first identified various baits with “wings” of different sizes and shapes. Since then, I have continued my search to discover catchy and harmonious combinations. This search led me to the following conclusions: in order to achieve a beautiful and stable game with the “wing” of sizes L and XL, the bait must be long enough - more than three times as long as the “wing”. In addition, maximum mobility is needed.
The next important factor is that the mass of the bait should be minimal. For example, streamers meet these requirements, as the famous fisherman Gennady Kuzmenko clearly proved in his video on trout fishing. Among silicone, these are various elongated baits: worms, slugs, twisters, etc. They all show excellent game, catching perch, pike, and sometimes catfish. But I didn’t want to limit the sphere of influence of the “winged jig” with a large plate to exclusively long and narrow-bodied baits. Unable to find a shad for sale that would work well in combination with any wing size, I began to search for one in the unmanifest space of my imagination.
As happens all the time, chance helped. A friend with whom I collaborated showed me a piece of fabric: “Look, it’s exactly like fish scales!” Indeed, the small silver glitter on the black synthetic fabric shimmered like the scales of a white fish. But the reverse side, naturally, was irreparably black. I didn’t immediately understand how this fabric could be used... The trial models that caught fish on my first fishing trip gave rise to a lot of questions, the answers to which I’ve been collecting for the last six months. As a result of the responses received, I am pleased to introduce you to new, patented and completely unique baits that will be available for sale in the near future.
Flat baits are a concept and a whole direction in artificial baits, a layer that we have to raise and develop; includes models made from flat materials. In fact, this trend originated a long time ago, when, given the backwardness of the market and the absence of silicone baits on it, craftsmen made twisters from sheet rubber, giving it the appropriate shape and then attaching it to a hook. I don’t even rule out the possibility that such baits appeared in the pre-silicon era, but, due to low technology, were not widespread.
Our baits are made of durable synthetic fabric, which we impregnate with special solutions to give it waterproof properties. They are cut using a laser, which makes them very durable with high mobility, which are almost mutually exclusive parameters for silicone baits. Thanks to its structure, this fabric is incredibly resistant to pike teeth. During the entire test phase, only once (!) the tail of the bait was bitten off (more than 100 pike were caught). Another remarkable fact is that the material has high positive buoyancy, which gives baits a number of additional advantages.
The next task was to find a convenient and reliable mount for the hook. It was this moment that delayed the start of mass production of baits for months (the first samples were presented at the spring exhibition in Kyiv). Whatever options I tried, I could not achieve a reliable and aesthetically pleasing attachment of the bait to the hook without an excessive amount of manual labor. The long-awaited option, although it was spelled out in the patent, was finally formed just a couple of weeks ago. The double hook is very simply inserted into the hole in the plastic “head” of the bait by the fisherman himself, snapping into a special groove. The bonus of this system is the location of the hook. Compared to mounting a silicone bait on a double, where the double is located in its front part, in the Flat baits mounting system its location moves quite significantly towards the center of the bait. This positioning of the hook increases the chances of a successful hooking, especially with large and long baits - the predator does not always swallow “just the thing I can’t do.” The effectiveness of hooking also increases due to the fact that the predator’s teeth do not “get stuck” in the silicone, and the hook is completely open. The bait is attached to a “eared” or “winged” jig head through a winding ring, which when used on a “winged” jig head makes it even more mobile.
Flat baits differ from silicone baits in their incredible lightness. 15-centimeter baits weigh 1-2 grams, ten times less than similar silicone ones. Completely new opportunities are opening up for anglers, namely, fishing with large baits with light tackle. Have you ever tried casting with 15- or 20-centimeter shad? The work is purely physical, the pleasure is below average. 15-, 18-centimeter flat baits can be worked for hours, just like small silicone ones. Tested in practice. I’m afraid that most spinning anglers won’t take my word for it, and will have to prove with countless photo and video materials that, despite the lack of volume, Flat baits catch no worse, and in many cases, much better than silicone baits.
To be honest, it came as a big surprise to me when, on my first fishing trip, flat baits won against silicon with a crushing score of 5:2. It was in January of this year, due to the warm weather, we were able to fish from a boat on the Dnieper channel. Even then it became clear to me that Flat baits were destined for success - only truly universal baits work in winter. What works in winter also works in summer, but the opposite does not always work! And so it happened - there were very few cases when flat baits were radically inferior to silicone ones - rather, this was due to the lack of the necessary colors and shapes at that moment. And there have already been quite a few cases where they were superior to silicone ones.
Flat baits fully realized the original task - baits of sufficient length (three times or more longer than the “wing”) play excellently on “winged” heads S, M, L and XL. Flat baits in combination with these heads, despite their youth, gave me a lot of new, wonderful experiences. Just last week we were filming a film based on the “winged jig”. We went to the lake, a “paysite” not far from Kyiv. I had never fished in such reservoirs and thought that catching pikes with a camera would not be difficult. The main task was to show the work of various, repeatedly tested silicone baits on heads with different sizes"wing".
But she didn’t go. By half past ten I didn’t have a single pike in my account! It’s time to go home, nodding to the fact that it’s mid-July, and there’s also a full moon. In the end, I used the lightest heads and small baits, but she didn’t do anything! Then I did exactly the opposite - I put 15 grams. XL and a two-tailed flat bait of a “glamorous” color, 12.5 cm long. I threw it all into the middle of the lake, and literally from the second cast there was a confident bite - I hooked it, there it was, a start had been made! A decent pike was taken into the landing net. It's about one and a half kilograms. I go a little further - there’s a bite, but it’s okay.
We move to another part of the lake - here all the pavements are free, there is room to roam! I decide to deepen the experiment on weighting and enlargement - I set it to 21 grams. with XL wing. The largest of the “flat” ones taken was a minnow with a length of 18 cm; the guys immediately dubbed this bait a “sheet”. I see that they look at me with a great deal of skepticism. It’s good that they don’t turn off the camera, because a powerful bite follows on the very first cast! This one gave out a lot of heat, managing to crawl under the pavement and get caught in the cord - I took it, let’s say, with a lot of luck! This fish can already be called a trophy - it is clearly over 3 kg! I put Predator-3 green at 11 gr. M. Casting from the fifth I catch pike. I return the “sheet” - the bite follows immediately!
It’s funny that the depth at the fishing spot is two meters, well, maybe at the release it’s two and a half, and I’m fishing with 21 grams... I make three turns of the reel at a fast pace, and then two turns slowly to hold the bait above the bottom. Long-term attempts to catch more with silicone will result in a fiasco, but with flat baits I catch a few more pikes. There were no more large ones, but the 18 cm “fish” was beyond competition! The water in the lake was cloudy, and the large bait, plus the powerful vibrations of the “winged head” turned out to be more attractive. Or perhaps the habituation factor was at work - the pike saw standard medium-sized baits here several times a day. And no one has launched such a bait here before. This happens quite often - fundamentally new baits appear, and the fish begin to give them a clear preference.
And when fishing from the shore during spring ban everything was the other way around - small heads with small plates and baits 6-10 cm long worked better. Lures of the same sizes with heads 4-7 grams worked great. and size M plates when fishing for pike perch at night. There were no trophies, but in terms of the number of fish caught (and, naturally, released) they clearly surpassed silicone.
In this fishing, the sensitivity of the gear plays a decisive role. In the absence of visual control, it is necessary to feel not only the slightest contact with the bottom or grass, but also the vibration of the bait’s tail, so that in the absence of this sensation you do not waste time on retrieving and reel it out as quickly as possible. The spinning rod is not long - no more than 210 cm, with a thin sensitive tip. And the cord is thin - up to 10 Lb, then all the vibrations of the bait are transmitted to the hand, and there is less sail in the current. The only enemy is hooks.
But the scope of application of Flat baits is not limited to “winged jigs”; they also show simply excellent results in combination with ordinary “eared” sinkers. I never claimed that the “winged jig” is preferable in all situations. Last week, my father and I went to the Kanevskoye Reservoir to surf the open spaces in search of pike perch. Over the course of the whole day, we caught a dozen zander, the largest was about a kilo, and all of them were caught with my bait. My father tried to fish with silicone all morning, and in the evening he violated the purity of the experiment - before lunch and a bite, he switched to flat baits. Fishing took place at depths of 5-7 meters next to 10-meter grooves. Wiring - two turns of the reel with spinning tosses on each, hitting the bottom with a heavy 28-gram load provoked bites from the sluggish July pike perch. Best result showed a golden sand-colored minnow 15 cm long.
Just a couple of days before writing this article, I went to the Kiev Reservoir with the famous athlete Igor Novgorodsky. Guided by his experience of fishing on this reservoir, we found fish almost immediately, but from the very morning my “sand” minnoy (and there were no other colors of this shape in stock yet) with a load of 25 grams. didn't work. Igor has already caught several pike perch, but I haven’t even had a bite yet. I placed a load of 18 grams. and a silver Shad on black fabric, 10 cm long, and my first pike perch was good - clearly worth the kilo! For successful fishing, it is advisable to be able to quickly adapt. The weight of the head, shape and color of the bait often play a decisive role. Later, my sand minnows on heavier heads also started working. Igor took the “sheet” from me and caught his biggest pike perch that day! And I was tempted by a 1.5-kilogram catfish to the “glamorous” Shad 10 cm long. I consider the main achievement of this fishing trip to be that I managed to infect Igor with faith in Flat baits.
The production series opens with baits three types- these are vibrotails of the Shad form (herring), Minnow form (small fish) and a two-tailed bait. Each model is available in several sizes and tried-and-tested colors. There are several more interesting forms in the finalization phase, and there are countless ideas! In my opinion, Flat baits are something of a transition from silicone baits to plastic ones, a new concept in jig fishing. I am sure that many anglers, even those who prefer fishing and do not like silicone, will appreciate these baits. Our website asmak.com.ua is already open! Welcome and see you again!
