what lures

[wackme]

im running over to lucaya sometime in july . i know to use cedar plugs for yellowfin but am clueless of what other lures to by. any
suggestions would be great.

[Relentless33]

naked ballyhoo ?

[Brokdik]

Can't go wrong with a blue and white Islander on a rigged ballyhoo....Also mix it up with a Stretch or yozuri diver or trembler on inside line....Drop back a daisy chain...Throw something at them that makes a racket like a bird or jet heads....Just have fun with it....

[Captain Fred Archer]

Many believe, and I am certainly one of them, that spreaderbars are not only the best tuna (all tuna) lures of them all, they are without a doubt the most exciting lures you can troll. Every strike is a surface blast and there are usually several tunas after each bar. And because each bar carries from seven-to-twenty teasers and an "armed chasebait", bars raise tunas in bunches, instead of little groups. If you run a half dozen or more, like we do on my charterboat and like a lot of other charterboat captains your wake looks like it is getting strafed by an F-16 when those tunas come. Our customers love it and so do we and the multiple hookups make for some excellent catch numbers.

Rather than come on like an ad, let me just say that if you are interested in learning more about bars, drop charter captain Bob Melville an email at RNRBOB@SBCGLOBAL.NET.

A word of warning though...bars drive king mackerel utterly insane, but since these lures are hollow squids rigged on mono leaders, those mack attacks do some serious shredding and chopping on the squids and sometimes the mono leader. And of course bluefish can do some serious damage too, as can barracuda. Also on the "uh, oh" list are Spaniards and ceros. Our version of those last two down in Cabo are known as Sierra Mackerel. They average about eight pounds and get up to twenty in the deep water where we fish for them. They come in insane packs and do a number on bars, but I love fishing for them so much that I put up with the bar carnage, patch 'em up and still fish for them pretty frequently, but unless you make bars, like I do, you shouldn't.

Bars stand up very well to the offshore gang, including sails and whitey, both of which hammer bars. The big surprise is wahoo. We have a year round wahoo fishery down in Cabo and there are some real horses. I am a wahoo fanatic and the bars are my best wahoo producers, followed by hi speed trolling and then specially rigged ballyhoo. The funny thing about the hoo's is that they don't do the kind of damage to bars that the smaller slashers do. Why, I don't know. You'll go through some of the squids on the "chase baits" that hook the fish, but even here, I fish chewed up squids until they are barely recognizeable because the 'hoos seem to hit them even better than they do new virgins.

I see that I'm on a roll here. I realise that bars are pretty new in southern waters, so I wanted to give you folks an honest heads up on where they tear the fish up (offshore) and where he opposite happens (inshore).

As I wrote above, if you'd like to learn more about bars (now that you know the negatives up front), contact Capt Bob. He is a charter captain who has used them for fifteen years.

[FinalPoint]

Hey Capt. Fred. Good to see you back. Nice info. Quick question. How and where can we pick up your book(s)?

[Captain Fred Archer]

PointMan,

Thank you. Been writing up a storm for the fishing mags, so haven't been able to visit my favorite places much. Taking a break from that and catching up with old friends. Just drop me an email at fredarcher@cox.net and I'll have the book info sent to you.

Nice swordy in your address thingy! Solid, chunky and healthy looking...the swordfish looks good too! (LOL)

Funny thing. We have a guy back there who is doing a lot of experimenting with night trolling for swords. Sounds like he's had some good success at it too. These are surface and near surface fish. He's actually trolling a set of SuperBars (among other things) and is convinced that he's going to get some fish with them! Actually, it makes sense, squid being such an important part of their diet and bars being the very best way of immitating whole pods of them.

That's as much as I know about what he's doing. It's his ballgame, I love seeing people push the envelope and trying new things (there wouldn't BE any new things if people didn't do that), so I'm watching and waiting to see how he does. If he swears me to secrecy, then so be it, but I hope he passes what he learns on sooner or later.

One thing's for sure...he's going to have all kinds of stuff slamming those packs of squid! Night is he only time that my charter captain buds and I could fish down in Cabo (daytime is for the paying customers), bars were our chosen weapons, yellowfin were the target, but you just never knew what the heck was going to glom those squidlies - once it was a big arsed sea turtle (hooked in the corner of the mouth, fought like the devil) and more than once, but the first one was the dilly, giant squid seven or eight feet long. They fought much like a huge amberjack or maybe even a tuna.

I happened to be leadering our first one ever and danged near had a heart attack when this terrible looking, sea monster thing suddenly charged the boat, shot into the spreader lights all lit up and looking like some space monster, grabbed the stern corner of my boat and bit it, then let go, popped its mouth out of the water and hit me square in the face and head with a powerful stream of water and ink that knocked my hat off, wrapped my sunglasses around to my back and ruined my clothes.

We were all in shock until somebody realized what "the thing" was. Then my buds laughed their arses off and kept making fun of "the dirty drowned rat" - me! We fought that thing for a lot more time and I got my revenge when three of the guys gaffed it and were dumb enough to slide it over the gunnel and into the 'pit. I was on the leader and bailed out as soon as they stuck the squid and was up on the bridge, watching them hopping and jumping around with that thing grabbing legs and arms and anything else it could get ahold of, spraying water and ink all over the place. Squid actually have hundreds of small teeth in their suction cups and this one was so big that he actually had a couple of the boys bleeding from just being grabbed for a second.

That critter owned the cockpit for a half an hour or so before anyone had the gonads to sneak down there and whack him on the noggin' with the Louiseville Slugger. What a night!

We have both the Humbolt squid, a giant subspecies and Articulos, the true giant squid down in Cabo. I don't know what kind that one was, but I do know that he was one mean handful of probably three hundred pounds of slither! Yargh!

I guess having experiences like that one is why they call us "Old Salts"!

We also caught lots of tunas, dolphins and even striped marlin and sails on the night shift. Night trolling is a blast and a half, except when the devil shows up!

[FinalPoint]

Cool info, Capt. I wonder how this guy will do on our side trolling the bars at night. Sometimes I'm out there and I feel like I'm sitting in dead water and nothing would hit my baits even if they were lit up with spot lights. Then other times you can't keep a bait in the water, lit up with an electralume, or even just a light stick.

My brother's sword the other night was caught with a light stick only, and it was the farthest bait away from the boat, so no help really from the swordlight (except for maybe drawing fish into the area).

Funny about that squid. I hear they can be nuts. I know a couple guys who have pulled in 30 lbers into there boat and realized they had made a mistake once ink started flying all over the place. I've seen the pictures of the humbolts caught over there, but I can't imagine a 300 lb squid. Must have been a night to remember anyway - and lots of calamari!

[Captain Fred Archer]

PointMan,

Yes, those squids are something else! We had a famous diver/cinematographer down in Cabo once who claimed that he had a pair of thirty footers swim above him and then just hover there. He said that he could see their huge eyes look at him once in a while, but he figured that they were hanging on the awesome food shelf he was on, waiting for some tuna or something to come along. He finally swam wide of them and returned to his boat. This happened within a hundred feet of the famed Cabo Arch!

Two of the most exciting chapters in my novel about the life and adventures of a female mako shark, Grim Ripper, involve her encounters first with a pack of Humbolts ("Sea Spiders") and later her battle with a true giant squid ("The Coming of the Kraken"). Frankly, those things scare the hell out of me!

The swordy troller has already caught some fish and I understand that this was during recent times and the sword fishing isn't so hot right now? I am from a different school than most, in that I believe that a sharp troller can do ANYTHING that a drifter can do, only better and of course, he can do things that the drifter simply cannot.

To begin with, trolling is merely controlled drifting, or can be. A drifter is a victim of the whims of current and wind, while a troller can locate and control and adjust his "drift" on specific pieces of structure, current breaks, bait concentrations, whatever. The troller can also "hover" on bait concentrations and actually follow them. As soon as one gets past the thought that trolling involves moving fast, dragging surface lures, he is ready to start doing some of the very different trolling methods that can really produce fish AND outfish the heck out of drifters.

That's the kind of stuff that I am constantly experimenting with and that allows me and others like me to come up with some pretty neat twists to this old game...

And I guess that's why some call us "screwballs", although "twisters" might be more like it! One thing is for sure...hard-headed, close-minded traditionalist who want to read a book and go, "Uh huh. That's right, that's how we've always done it" need to steer clear of my books - they'd be too much for them! Open minded, curious, looking for the leading edge twisters and scewballs love 'em though and there's more of them around than you think...

They're just quiet, is all.

[Boboe]

We've tried to run bars or "umbrellas" as we call them in the Florida panhandle. Our success offshore was not all that good. Maybe we ran them wrong. I don't know. The thing looked great in the water and caused a hell of a commotion.

My favorite baits to LOOK AT in the water off of my corners have got to be chin weighted split tail mullet and unweighted spanish. They look so damn good, you KNOW the man in the blue suit is going to come grab it!

[Captain Fred Archer]

Boboe,

Umbrellas are very different than spreaderbars, although some of the metal ones are very much like umbrellas - I guess coat hangers would be more like it. Our bars are vastly different. As for making a surface ruckus, I am from the school that wants my surface teaser, a MONSTER Roddy Hays Zeus (head the size of a big cantalupe) and for powerful underwater vibrations a diver teaser that I also tow called a "Toad".

Spreaderbars catch a goodly number of blues and are death on Whitey and sails, but their real claim to fame is tuna, dolphin and wahoo. This isn't the place to get into a long dissertation on spreaderbars. If you are interested in learning some more about them, email me at fredarcher@cox.net and I will have our E-catalog sent to you. You might wind up being interested in a couple of the books that I have written.

We have some hellacious good blue marlin fishing down in Cabo. I actually run two bars for them, but I have horses or Spaniards on my long riggers and two of the best marlin lures on earth on my short corners. Gimme that plastic on the corners!

Ouuuweee, Mister! Dem blue ladies rule!

[Boboe]

It's been 6 years since I fished Baja. We did 9 days of fishing out of Los Barriles in East Cape in late October 2000. I might get to fish Cabo for 3 days in September, depending on my work schedule. It's a hell of a fishery, for sure.

[Captain Fred Archer]

Roger that, Tex, Roger that! August is usually the magic month. Did one, seven consecutive day stretch that month where we caught and released 26 blues and one black, almost all horse lady fish (smallest about 300#). Weather then is brutal, pero nada para un hombre de Houston, Tejas. We didn't spend all day marlin fishing, either. We spent a lot of time roosterfishing, wahoo hunting and messing with some big tunas.

Get this, Tex. The last day of that string, or I'm sure that we would have kept it going, this little, skinny guy from your town had the boat chartered with just him and his wife, a non-fishing nurse aboard. When I asked him what he wanted to go after he said, "blue marlin only". I told him "good, me too, cowboy" and off we went.

First stop was a double on BIG tunas in the 200# class. We leave one rod in the holder, he gets in the chair and proceeds to flat hammer the first fish. Then he takes the other outfit that still had the fish on it and kicked that one's tail too. I'm thinking to myself, "We've got an angler and a half here". But there are no trade winds that day and it is already a bajillion degrees down there in the pit and I fear for the heat taking my angler out. He comes up in the tower with me for a while and I tell him to make sure that he stayed hydrated, especially if we get into his blue. He says, "I'm from Houston, captain, I'm used to it."

I start to respond when I see her coming on the left corner Andromeda that had caught all of the twenty-four marlin the six previous days. He is down the ladder in a flash after I holler, "Left flat! Left flat! Big blue, boys! She's coming, coming, coming, missed it!" Somehow she missed the lure on the classic attack from the rear and she shot past the lure, then did one of those impossible high speed turns and annihilated the lure in a head-on shot that it's a miracle the tackle survived - God Bless 800# leader material, bent butt rods and Accurate 130 reels!

We landed and released her after one the most spectacular battles I have ever seen a big blue put out. I was very concerned about my angler and the effect the heat was having on him, but he seemed fine and after we released the big girl he looked up at me and said, "Any chance for another one, skipper?" I said, "you sure you're up to it?" (Remember, this guy had been worked by two huge tunas and now a seven hundred or so super blue.) "No prob!" he said. A half hour later, here comes a very nice blue that wolfs down that Andromeda on the first shot, then greyhounds thru the rest of the spread and off toward the horizon. Another war later and she's released. My cranker had been drinking water and the boys had wet him down with freshwater several times during the fight.

It was now about 1 pm, the sun was directly overhead and it had gone way past ugly hot and humid. Didn't bother the cowpoke, though. By then I guess he thought that we could do anything and he came up top, thanked me for a great day and said, "Any chance for a black marlin? I've never caught one of them either (the blues were his first). I told him that there are a lot more blues than blacks in Cabo, that we hadn't seen one in over a week, but that they are always a possibility.

A half hour later and my Mex captain and the first of two deck crew I run with is sitting up in the tower with me. I'm driving and he is watching the lures when he blurts out, "Right Rigger, right rigger! Vela, vela, vela (sailfish)! I jump up, turn around and drive with my back to the controls and look at the left rigger. There is a big, black shape behind the Spaniard. Looks like a huge sailfish on his side with his sail up, but it isn't. "Negro (black marlin)!" I yell. Meme and I do the "Vela/negro" several times before she abandons the Spaniard and charges all the way up the spread and grabs the Andromeda that was doing all the damage and we were on and getting ready to go backwards.

I'm really worried about the heat getting to my angler by now. It's a million degrees down there and this guy is honking on his black.

The last thing that I remember is the fish leadered and billed and me yelling down to not lose the lure, remember, this is the third fish on it today...then I had a heat stroke up in the tower and went down like a stone. Killed me twice; once on the table in the Cabo ER and again on the medivac Lear that took me stateside. Don't EVER wind up in a Mexican hospital!

The moral of the story ain't what you think it is...It's MAKE SURE THAT YOU AND ANYONE THAT YOU GO DOWN WITH HAS CURRENT MEDICAL EVACUATION INSURANCE ANY TIME YOU HEAD DOWN TO MEX. And only fish where there is a big enough airport to handle a Lear, not out in the boonies somewhere.

Oh yeah, I survived. Most who get heat stroke don't.

[wackme]

well the news is in i got back quite a while ago but havent had the time to post a reply. we started off at 6:45 out of jupiter inlet seas 4-6 , seven hours later we roll in to lucaya. everyone is whipped so no fishing a t all first day . the partying started earlier than planned .3 30 . any way we wake up 8 the next morning we tried to chum up greenies but of course no bait in sight. so we prepare to go any way fishing a 5 line spread , 2 cedars , 1 naked hoo, 1 large marlin lure (black bart ) , and one islander . of course we find the birds and the tunas with them. they would touch a thing after 6 hours we called it a day and headed in empty handed. later we went out diving and managed to spear 8 hogs and 4 groupers and caught a bunch of flags. sorry no pictures. we headed back the next day , we didnt see a single piece of weed , board , or floating object either way. i did learn how to tell the diferece between birds and other boats and learned how to make a spread with out outriggers, so it wasnt as bad a fter all and the partying cheered everyone up . meeting chicks will do that.



thanks to all that gave tips and shared knoweledge. we ll getem next time

[Boboe]

"...and caught a bunch of flags"

Can you clarify what that means? What's a flag, other than something you run up the rigger when you catch a billfish?

[catching]

flags are large yellow tail snapper

[Boboe]

Heh heh, no wonder I didn't know. Those don't exist in my part of the Gulf.