Live Fishing Bait -Part-4
June 18, 2009 by Daniel Ambrose · Leave a Comment
We continue our live fishing bait series with our discussion on some of our favorite bugs. So if your interested in crickets, flies, and some other goodies like that, you are going to want to pay attention to this post.
The way I see the insects is there are the swimmers, the crawlers, jumpers, and of course, the fliers. All of which are like candy to different fish. They cannot help themselves when they come in contact with their favorite one, because they see it so rarely it becomes a treat.
Crickets and grasshoppers are a fishing favorite, because like nightcrawlers, some fishermen can catch them as they need them, and for others they are commonly available at your local live fishing bait store.
Crickets are usually found in wooded areas or fields, especially the dark-colored cricket, commonly known as a field cricket. There is a gray cricket that is commercially raised and sold in bait shops and pet stores.
Grasshoppers like grassy or weedy fields. Most are 1-2 inches in length. The dark colored grasshoppers are some shade of gray or brown and live on the ground. The green shaded crickets live on plants.
Mayflies are a fish favorite and they are a very interesting choice as they go through many changes in their short life cycle. Of course this is one of those which came first things, the egg, or the mayfly because their short life is so ever changing.
The mayfly life cycle is something to be aware of as they can be used as live fishing bait in several different stages of their metamorphosing life. So lets look at their short life and see something amazing.
1) A mayfly mates with the opposite sex while in flight.
2) After mating the female drops her eggs in the water.
3) The eggs sink, adhering to plants, rocks or other things at the bottom.
4) The larvae hatches in about six months. They eat and grow for about five months going through several molts -changes.
5) When full grown they swim to the surface.
6) Now it splits and sheds its skin -molts, and in seconds it has wings that harden.
7) The mayfly then flies off to nearby vegetation where it stays for a day, or two
It molts into an adult where it lives just long enough to mate and drop its eggs, except a few live for weeks.
Its the many changes and short life of this live fishing bait that gets it so much attention in this post, but we are going to pause here, we will say its in memorial for such a short lived fishing bait and we hope you will return to view the next post in this Live Fishing Bait series.
Live Fishing Bait
June 11, 2009 by Daniel Ambrose · Leave a Comment
There are a lot of live fishing baits in this world and they all are broken down into many different categories. For instance, you are not likely to use a one inch minnow as your live bait if you are fishing for sharks in the ocean.
So you see there are some restrictions to what live baits you use and where you use them. Some baits are only available in certain areas or during certain times of the year, while others are simply not useful for one kind of catch, but extremely good for another.
We want to discuss things like minnows, and other baitfish, as well as things like crickets, frogs, toads, leeches and worms, crustaceans, salamanders and all sorts of flying insects.
Minnows are used for numerous reasons. Some minnows are chosen for their size, shape, activeness, sex, flash or color, even taste and smell. With so many decisions its a wonder anglers ever have time to get their bait in the water and this is just the decisions regarding the minnows and we still need to figure out our hook. But we will save that for a different topic.
Lets quickly go over minnows so you can identify them and perhaps even learn why some are chosen for one catch, but not the other. We will now identify the most popular thirteen minnows at your local bait shop.
Minnow Identification:
1) Fatheads, sometimes called mud-minnows or tuffies, have a short first ray on the dorsel fin and live in lakes and rivers throughout most of North America.
2) Creek Chubs look similar to the hornyhead chub, but have smaller scales and a dark spot at the front base of their dorsel fin. A very common stream minnow usually found in eastern North America and thrives in gravel bottom streams east of the rockies in the United States and southern Canada.
3) Bluntnose Minnows are more rounded at the nose than the fathead and have a dark band from the tail to eye and they live in the eastern half of the United States.
4) Horneyhead Chubs, also known as redtail chubs, have a lateral band that extends to the tail and they prefer gravelly streams from Wyoming to New York, south to Arkansas.
We will pause there and pick this up in our next post, so be sure and check back for Live Fishing Bait -Part – 2. I would strongly suggest you bookmark the website, or take this opportunity to sign up for my free RSS feed.
