Hooking Deadbaits
Properly
Being able to mount your
baits properly on your baits is a far more important subject than many
novice pike anglers realise. Not only will hooking your baits properly
enable you to hook any taking pike with a reasonable amount of confidence,
good efficient hooking can also ensure that the pike will be hooked in
the jaws, and that they will therefore be easy to unhook and return to
the water.
Now the good news - good
hooking is neither difficult nor especially time-comsuming. All it requires
is a well made trace (details of which can be found elsewhere on this website)
There are basically two things
you must think about when mounting a bait on your hooks, these are:
To explain this further let
us take a look at some typical baits, in this case a herring, but this
advice would apply to most if not all other forms of deadbait.
HALF BAITS
This photo shows a typically
sized half bait of between four and six inches long. Hooking a bait such
as this is, or should be, simplicity itself. Simply place one hook of the
upper treble in the tail root, with the lower hook placed as you can see
in the photo. The beauty of this system is that however the pike picks
up the bait, at least one of the trebles will be in its mouth, therefore
the
moment you get indication of a take you should strike. I stress those
words because it is still mistakenly believed that you should wait for
the pike the 'turn the bait' (whatever that means) before striking. This
is not so. The main point of placing hooks on a bait is to ensure that
it has at least one of the hooks in its mouth, thus enabling an instant
strike, and greatly lessening the chances of a deeply hooked fish.
The hooking set up as shown
above can also be successfully practised when using small whole bait of
between four to six inches in length.
WHOLE BAITS
Of course, pike anglers
often use baits bigger than six inches and these whole baits on the other
hand, present a slightly more challenging problem in ensuring good 'coverage'
of the bait with the hooks. Many methods are used to ensure good 'hook
coverage' on these larger baits, but a very simple solution using a standard
two hook trace is shown below.
As you can see, the two trebles
have been placed further along the flank at a point which ensures that
when the pike picks up the bait it will have at least one of the hooks
inside its mouth. Again, a truly instant strike must be employed
with such a rig to ensure that the pike is hooked in the jaw and not deeply
hooked. You will also see from the photo that the trace has been tied to
the tail root of the bait with a small length of light elastic. This ensures
that the bait stays on the hook securely during casting and enables the
trebles to be placed further down the flank without the need for adding
a third hook to the trace.
Finally, don't forget that
baita can also be hooked in a very similar manner 'head up' the trace.
The advantages of such a presentation are mainly to do with ensuring the
bait stays on the hook more securely during long distance casts, the tails
of baits can also be trimmed, as shown, the aid the casting process.
At the risk of repeating
myself, I must once again stress that the hooking set-ups shown here have
been purposefully designed for instant strikes. They are very efficient
both in hooking pike securely and ensuring they can be safely unhooked
and returned to the water.
James
Holgate |
