Heavy Hitters!
Salmon anglers have long been fans of the classic T-55 FlatFish — the plug’s big-time thump has accounted for countless river Chinook (and big lakers, too!) over the years. But the knock on the original version has always been that it’s not a great lure for flat-line situations. In other words, you have to add weight to get the thing down for backtrolling…or standard trolling.
Well, with the introduction of Worden’s/Yakima Bait’s newly designed Hawg Nose T-55 FlatFish, you can have your cake…and eat it too!
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Not many things work better for river kings than a sardine-wrapped plug!
For some reason, there seems to be a lot of mystery out there regarding sardine-wrapped plugs for salmon. It may be a bit intimidating to the uninitiated, but there’s really nothing to it. Here’s a quick crash course on how to do it…
[click to continue…]JD,
We may actually get a salmon season here on the upper Salmon River in ID. I’m getting my gear ready and I want to try some back trolling with eggs and was wondering if you could give me some advice on the size of divers to try. The river should be running 5k to 8k cfs and most holes or runs will be 9-15 feet deep. I’ll run 30 lbs braid main line and 20 lbs leaders about 5′ from the diver.
Any help would be great, thanks for keeping up your web site.
–Eric T.
Hey Eric! Salmon? What do those look like? We’ve had two straight years of closures down here and I’m starting to forget!
Anyway, congrats for maybe getting a season! Believe me…enjoy every minute of it and don’t take it for granted!
As far as divers go, you can’t beat Luhr Jensen’s Jet Divers. You could probably get away with a Size No.
20, though it sounds like you have some pretty serious flow there, so I may bump that up to a No. 30.
Even in clear water, I don’t run anything lighter than 25-pound flouro for my leaders, so you may want to increase that as well. Kings don’t care about your leader in most cases!
For a detailed look at how to fish this technique, check out my article on Divers & Bait, which has some photos on how to rig up properly.
Good luck!
Headed for a river that has salmon in it this summer and fall? Take some diver & bait rigs with you — it’s a super easy and extremely deadly technique that you can pick up in no time!
While there are several good ways to get a big, juicy glob of hot red sulfite eggs (or sand shrimp) down in the faces of river salmon, the ol’ diver and bait is often the first one to which I turn. [click to continue…]
by JD on November 7, 2008
After grinding it out through an excruciatingly rough fall salmon season on the Trinity River, where very few fish showed up, pal and guide Mike Stratman of Redwood Coast Fishing finally had one of those days on Nov. 5 that makes up for all the rest — you know the kind, when everything goes absolutely perfectly.
Here he is holding a 40-pound class king, just one of 15 landed by his boat that day. Way to go!
