Elephants Eat Peanuts

[Fish_Eye]

Yes, I subscribe to the notion that if you want big fish you should use big bait, but sometimes you have to alter that frame of mind realizing that even elephants eat peanuts.

While on a recent trip to Florida I had the pleasure of watching Mark Nichols, the founder of D.O.A. lures, work magic with a variety of his soft plastic baits…most of them diminutive offerings.

Here are a few of the things I learned with this master of soft plastic.

1. All fish love shrimp…especially tarpon, snook, trout…why not stripers, fluke and weakfish?
   
2. Don’t be afraid to make noise, you won’t scare the fish, you’ll attract them – the DOA clacker rig is a weighted float that acts as an attracter and as you splash it across the surface of the water with a suspended plastic glow shrimp or TerrorEyz jig you actually focus the attention of nearby fish to your offering.
   
3. Big snook love TerrorEyz drifted under bridges and jigged off the bottom…why not big stripers in the shadow-lines of our Yankee bridges?
   
4. Six foot long tarpon slurp down Root Beer over Pearl colored Soft Plastic Crabs…why not fussy stripers when they’re focused on calico crabs?
   
5. You’ll probably catch more fish on the drop with a jig than at any other time, that’s why he uses Power Pro braid…you have to be able to detect the subtle strike.
   
6. TerrorEyz annihilate Florida “bonito” or what we call false albacore…why not use these offerings when they are focused on bay anchovies?
   
7. Don’t attach a jig to your line with anything other than a non-slip loop knot.

Here are a couple of pictures from our trip, I’ll post a few more later.