Here is a vid from the other day. I waited until I was on a big school to up my odds then hooked on a home made plug. This is probably the 3rd cast but was feeling them knocking it the whole time, I guess single hooks lower the chance of a hook up. These were all 18-20 inch fish. I marked at least 1000 fish along a quarter of mile of marsh. [video]https://youtu.be/I8EjsC4mAN4[/video]
Nothing better than getting fish on a hand made plug. We teach a class here at my school called Systems Engineering. It's an 11th grade class and one project is designing and building a plug to catch local fish. Student research the species, find out their feeding habits for different times of the year, then build a plug for the target fish... properly weighted for depth, action, etc. They're STOKED when they get fish on them. It's almost a lost art. Kind of like tying flies... but way harder, IMO. I can tie 10 files in an hour... but it takes me a week to build a plug.
I have actually just started tying my own saltwater flies. And yeah, I understand the C-A-R thing, that's pretty much all I do.
That's funny, I can tie a Hares Ear with my eyes closed or a wooley bugger. I'm a decent carver and can do a basic plug shape by hand in 20 minutes. But when you add ballast, paint etc it can take days to get one to look half way decent. Nothing worse than finishing one up, dreaming the whole time about how you are about to revolutionize fishing and on your fist cast you realize that it's floating upside down, lol.
That's awesome. Kids must get super psyched to go to that class... I used to make plugs with my dad when I was a kid. It was somuch fun to catch a fish on a plug we made. Also use to make rods (well he would and I'd get in the way). I still have a couple that we made back in the 80's. One in particular (super stiff) I love for snagging bunker I gotta get back in to that.
I refinished an antique bamboo fly rod once. Good thing it wasn't a collector's item... just a basic cheapo of the times. Didn't do such a great job at that, either.
Caught some nice catfish over the weekend. I'm hoping to be in line and on time when the striped bass arrive.
Caught a 24" catfish this evening; thought it was a rockfish on the line lol. Looks like we might get some waves this weekend. Stoked!
Nice!! Were you in the bay? Yeah man, I'll be at IRI on Sunday. Red Durango, come say hi if ya see me.
Z thanks man! Caught that fish off the upper bay. I'll definitely be in the water this weekend; not sure where yet. See ya out there
Did pretty solid last weekend. Got three wahoo, two yellow fin tuna, false abacore and about 12 black fin tuna
Seriously need some good trebles on that otherwise i would be very very surprised if anything gets hooked if it hits it. Nice lure though. Send one my way and ill tear up the red drum
The coastal bays are teaming with stripers right now. The rivers like the Nanticoke are filled with big fat white perch, stripers and the ever present catfish. The Pocomoke is nuts with crappie, some perch and massive pickerel. I have sampled all of them over the last 2 weeks and have caught hundreds of fish, so if you live on the eastern shore go fishing!