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Ron Colby here with Gary Yamamoto Custom Baits. One technique that a lot of people have just
forgot about; they don’t use it very much anymore, but we’ve been using a lot here
at Lake Pal and catching stripers with it. I’ve been using it a lot across the country
catching large mouth, small mouth, and spotted bass with it too, and that’s spooning. Talking
about spoons not the ones you eat your cereal with in the morning, but heavy heavy spoons.
You fish very vertically. You can fish them anywhere from 20. I would say 20-25 feet is
the minimum for shallowness and go all the way down to 100 feet of water in the late
winder time with stripers using great big sardine looking…This is a 3 ounce spoon,
this is like a 1 ounce spoon. Okay, one of the things you want to do if you’re doing
spoons, you wan to make sure you have good split rings on your back. I change out my
hooks. Go to a good Gamamkatsu hook. I usually change to an oversized. Now, this one is a
little too big, but it’s big for the big stripers we’re catching here at Pal. I always
put a split ring on the nose of the hook. That’ll help the bait fall. A lot more action
on it during the fall. I don’t do this a lot, but if you’re getting a lot of line
twist, especially if you’re using spinning reels or something like that to do your spooning
with and you hate the line twist, you can put a nice little barrel swivel up on that
split ring and tie it to it. That’ll even give it more action as it’s falling and
it’ll help get that line twist out of your line. What you want to be using for your spooning
rods is generally a very stiff rod. You want something with a lot of backbone; you want
something with extremely fast tip all the way up. Generally, you want something with
a very long, like 7 foot is the minimum. If you’re fishing really deep, you’ve got
to really set the hook on the fish hard and move a lot of line and the line stretch. If
you use a long rod, very heavy line, 16 pound test the lightest and all the way up to…a
lot of guys will use 80 pound braid and stuff. You want heavy line, heavy rods and a nice
spoon, and this is what they end up looking like after you get done catching a lot of
fish.