mambo minnow mania
 

After the morning chores, and cleaning the boat, I decided to test the new knots I tied. Fish caught, knots adjusted, hate what I tried.

The tide was moving fast. I slowed down to adjust my equipment and started marking fish. Threw a jig with a sluggo, and came up blue on the first cast. The first fish over the gunnel was a 30", 8lb blue, mean as can be. I almost wanted to keep his butt just to make sure he did not destroy any more baits, but I was feeling merciful and he went back to the deep.

I was heading for 'Damiens Pride', but I spied a whole lot of Striped Bass pushing water and jumping for bait. I stopped and set up a drift right past them. I tried a green needlefish, and the bass just scattered. I tried a mackerel popper, same effect. The fish were moving slower than the drift, so I had to reset a few times. I tried a mambo minnow, shallow dive, and blam! Every cast, a beefy bass. The two I measured were 40" and 38", one was really heavy. I caught 20-25 fish on the mambo minnow in 2.5 hours, I had to retie the leader twice, because the bass's sandpaper lips where shredding the 50lb leader. Here are the best pics.

http://www.fletcherfishing.org/wp-co...June14th_4.png

After having a bass just swallow the double treble hooks, I removed the center treble. The bass went cuckoo for a mambo minnow

http://www.fletcherfishing.org/wp-co...June14th_3.png

25 fishes in 2 hours? nice job, man. =)

nice work!

Sounds like a great day. Congrats.

Love those plugs. Congrats on a stellar outting!

Every cast on the fish resulted in a take down. I would say three casts did not go tight. If my drift and the fish matched, I would have caught a few more. Then the bite just died, even though they stayed on the surface.

center treble on a mambo? Do you mean the front one?

the front is where I tie the line on. The center treble is off the belly, and the tail treble is on the back. My terms might be incorrect, but the center/front treble was removed due to a really deep swallow resulting in a bad bleed, one for the box.

Hmmm... if I were going to remove one of the trebles, it would probably be the rear one. For me, that rear treble frequently gets screwed up where the gill plates meet beneath the fish's chin. Even the small bass we got into last week (20" and smaller), most were hooked in the mouth by the front treble.

My girlfriend's dad has switched both the front and rear hooks to single siwash hooks. I don't have any experience with it though.

Got it. BTW, bad form on my part, congrats on a good day. It has been the same way from the beach. I take it that they were feeding on the bay anchovies, or was it sand eels?

I did notice that, as the days have worn on, a lot of the fish we get will take the rear hook, which I find to be unusual. Most of the time bass take the front, and I use an upturned siwash on the rear to minimize the 2nd hook from taking. I figure that they are just so gorged that they are lazy and just snapping at things out of instinct rather than going in for the kill. Also, if you have not, you may want to think about going barbless when the fish are like that.

Johnny, one of my pals does the same thing as Dan with the 2x siwash thing, and he hooks up at the same rate as me.

Good to know. Thanks for the info. Can't beat getting the same rate of hookups and not having to use trebles. I second your words on fishing barbless - Bob finally has me convinced. 90% of my trips, I'm not looking to keep fish and fishing barbless helps for a quick release with minimal damage.

I hope the beaches are treating you well. I'll be down for a few days next week.

Hey Mambo ! Mambo Italiano !

Sounds like a great day! Nice work!

CONGRATS, StriperZ~~~
love those kinds of BITES!!!