If all goes right this weekend I will be pulling some big bait next week. I have pulled Richards 2$ each herring before but have never really pulled it in places i know big fish are hanging around. Just have always “hoped” something big would take it. Biggest fish have ever taken with them was a 24" fish and they were hooked on the stinger hook.
The bigger fish i hope to catch will surely eat the whole thing or if my thinking is corret will probably take it by the head. As they do when trolling large lures on downriggers.
My question is what size hook do most people use in the nose of a lets say 8-10" or bigger bait. I am sure my 2/0 hook i use on normal herring will get lost in the bigger bait. Thanks yall.
Many years ago, a friend and I used to drift for stripers using live bream for bait. We only fished one rod each and had the bream rigged up similar to a Carolina rig using about a 3’ leader and using a fairly heavy egg sinker. We always hooked the bream,which were sometimes bigger than my hand ( I can easily palm a basketball), between the head and dorsal fin. We hooked them as shallow as we could, hoping to keep them as lively as possible. Whenever we got a strike we would let the reel free spool until the fish stopped. We figured the fish needed to turn the bream before trying to swallow it (we weren’t planning to release any fish). We never used hooks bigger than 4/0 and caught a lot of fairly good sized stripers even with 3/0 hooks.
I once had a striper almost to the net. The bream was so big it had wedged in its mouth and the fish wasn’t even hooked. Needless to say when it saw the boat it made one last surge and the bream popped out of its mouth.
I think you could use a nice sized white perch for your big bait. Also, back then, we knew that if we could put a crappie down there and a bream, the crappie would always get hit first. Stripers back then really liked crappie.
Using 12-14 inch gizzards below the Russell Dam on the Hill, we used 6/0 hooks with bait hooked through the nostrils like a herring. Back in May, we had several solid hookups but only got one bigun in the boat. That’s the way it goes sometimes. Anyway, I prefer not to use stingers if I can help it. I feel they make the bait look unnatural.