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I'm going through the rear hook eye from each side of the strip with the cable ties. It takes a very sharp needle to get through the skin on some of them. There is soldered wire on the front hook, and I place the front cable tie between the wire and the hook eye and pull like crazy to tighten it. Worst case is the front one might turn a little with a fish on, but it's easy to straighten out. If things loosened up too much, I just replaced the cable tie when I get home.
Since writing the article, I learned something else - the strips tweak very nicely with sluggo weights. I insert these into the bottom edge of the strip. A full one goes parallel to the rear hook shank. About 2/3 of one goes parallel to the front hook shank. It's amazing how that little extra weight gets the strip to track deeper. It also helps keel the lure and allows for a faster retrieve without any rolling on its side. The weighted ones obviously cast farther too.
I've actually caught more fish on the 12-inch Juniors than the full size strips, but I think that's only because I threw the smaller ones more.
I had a conversation with the manufacturer after the article came out, and they were very receptive to my comments concerning the strip thickness. They also expressed an interest in selling them pre-rigged as I described, as opposed to rigging them flat as they do now.
As I mentioned in the article, one of the biggest problems I had was that some of the strips were just too thin to rig the way I wanted. I'm glad to hear that the person who started this thread received thick ones when he ordered them.
So not every strip you buy is a good one, and they all take some patience to rig, but you only needle a couple good ones to take a lot of fish. A slow retrieve with a slight twitch every second or two makes these things come alive. I'm hoping enough interest is generated in the lure so that some day I can just go to the local B&T and buy them cut properly and ready to fish. They really have a lot of potential, and it's great not having to worry about them degrading as with real rigged eels.
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