A bunch of my musky and walleye baits have have been exposed to ciggybutt smoke over the winter. I want to wash the stink off the baits and am wondering what you think of this approach….
use 4 five gallon pails of warm/hot water. The first has some mild dish detergant and a good brush, the next three are filled with clean hot water for rinsing the soap off the baits. Each bait gets dunked first in soap, scrubbed, and then dipped in 3 buckets of proceedingly clean and hot water. Then hang to dry and put a fan on them to dry them quickly. (Once dry, sharpen and paint each hook point!)
Last time I tried to wash baits it was a One Stooge (me) fiasco. I filled my dishwasher with about 60 musky baits and let her rip. Here's the fiasco part – it takes only about 20 minuutes to put 60 big lures into a dishwasher. Easy. But, it takes about 3 hours to remove the lures because of all those dang hooks.
So, how would you wash 80-100 muskie baits plus about 50 walleye/bass cranks?
Thanks!
Cool, something fun to talk about on here!
Personally I would leave them just the way they are, here's why. Two of the most successful baits of all time are/were produced by a couple serious chain smokers. Both the Eagle Tail (when George built them) and the Phantom will/would smell of smoke when you first get them (the phantom less than the Eagle tail). Keep in mind the Eagle Tail was responsible for more 50" fish than any other lure until the Cowgirl craze.
Here's where I contradict that though… for a muskie scent doesn't play a significant (probably not any) role in feeding. A walleye on the other hand could be impacted by scent BUT for the scent to make a difference it has to be associated with a negative/positive (repeated) experience. Unless you know these walleyes get caught and released constantly on lures that smell like smoke scent will have no bearing on your catch rate. It is more likely that they would have a negative response to L-serine (given off by mammals) in which case the smoke may actually provide the cover scent you need to catch more and bigger fish.
"Ranger" said:
Last time I tried to wash baits it was a One Stooge (me) fiasco. I filled my dishwasher with about 60 musky baits and let her rip. Here's the fiasco part – it takes only about 20 minuutes to put 60 big lures into a dishwasher. Easy. But, it takes about 3 hours to remove the lures because of all those dang hooks.
That is the funniest thing I've read in a while!!!
But I think you were on the right track, just need to separate some job functions here. First, remove all the hooks and work on sharpening them WHILE you are washing your lures. Now you can put the lures back in the washer, but I don't think soap/detergent is the right way. I would instead fill the washer with sucker minnows & shiners from the bait shop, and put that through several cycles. That should be awesome
"Duke" said:
I would instead fill the washer with sucker minnows & shiners from the bait shop, and put that through several cycles. That should be awesome
I like that idea. Imagine the carnage and the smell of steamed suckers… I would suggest offering to babysit for your neighbors and using their dishwasher for this experiment.
I agree with Will that scent doesn't make much of a difference in getting a fish to strike. I tried soaking my bucktails and cranks in coolers full of a) pike and b) perch. The baits smelled great (to me) but resulted in no strikes at all, just a repeat of the few follows that we were getting in MN and ON.
Well so far most of what I've read supports the idea that muskies don't use scent much one way or another. On the other hand, a couple years ago I bought one of those new-fangeled scents, comes in a form very much like vasoline. I smeared it on big cranks when trolling after dark. I do believe I boated more muskies with the scent, but what a mess, the stuff eventually has to be washed off. Thus the dishwasher mis-adventure.
I already sharpen every hook point over the winter, and I also paint the freshly exposed metal with a red sharpie marker. (The ink prevents corrosion of hook points while stored baits are exposed to moisture from freshly-used baits (hair baits, especially) in the box.) Doing every point takes hours and hours and hours plus I usually eventually file thru the center of my left thumbnail, very painful. To take every hook off and then put it back on the bait, man, that would really be a job.
Maybe I could buy a $15 wool suit at Goodwill, hang the baits all over me and then walk thru a carwash?
Hey, I think you're onto something with the car wash idea….
Here's a potentially less-painful way than with the Goodwill suit: You got a pick-em-up truck? (I think everyone in MI has one except me…) String the lures through their tow-eyes (loop through twice, to keep them from sliding along the line), dangle the strung-up lures across the bed of your truck, and THEN go through a touch-less car wash (with your truck that is; the Goodwill suit is optional).
Don't forget to pay extra for the wax cycle! It'll make the lures slide more easily though the water next time….
I have an Explorer. But you've given me an idea for how to handle all the non-hair baits…..
I have a 16'X40' deck on this house. I have a roll of fencing wire and a couple turnbuckles. Hook one end of the wire to a 4X4" post, thread a BUNCH of baits onto the wire thru the bait eyes, then use a turnbuckle to draw the wire tight to another 4X4" post on the other side of the deck. Have a bucket of really hot water with some mild detergent and walk along to brush each bait down. (Wear a wiremesh fish cleaning glove to hold the baits while scrubbing.) Run a hotwater hose from the laundry room to rinse the baits, again, scrubbing with . Move washed baits to folding laundry drying racks and bring them inside. These are the old foldable racks made up of 1/4" wooden dowels; each drying rack can hold 100+ baits and, most helpfully, anyone can lift and walk with a single rack that's holding over 100 baits.) Fan dry once inside the house. Now the baits are ready to sharpen/paint the hooks.
Waddya think?
I was SURE we weren't the first to come to the topic, and look what I found:
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i'm just going to thow in a humorous antidote about lure washing. when i was a kid my dad or uncle had read something in sports afield magazine about this same subject. the writer said to wash your lures in Ivory Soap Flakes(remember those). i don't know how the writer meant for you to wash the lures. but my dad and uncle decided that the washing machine was the way to go. my mother had a lingerie basket on your washer. so they loaded it up with lures, put in the soap flakes and turned it on. i remember standing there when the washer had finished and they opened the lingerie basket. the treble hooks on those lures were so tangled together the lures were literally wedged into the basket in one solid mass. i know they spent a good potion of the rest of the evening just to get the lures out of the basket. i don't know how long it took to untangle the lures because my uncle took them home with him in a mass and brought back my fathers's lures the next weekend. i do know they never tried it again and my mother and aunt reminded them about it for years. so if you were to search Sports afield from the late 1950's or early 1960's you could find some info on this topic. just don't use the washing machine.
And as for getting the scent off, there's this:
If you think garlic spray is unusual, well have I got a story for you, I was surf fishing for steelhead, at elberta, Mi. a few years ago,I was using brown trout spawn,I noticed the fella down the way from me was staying more busy than me fighting and landing fish so I got curious,and kinda meandered down there, by em, pretty soon he wondered over to me and inquired about how well I was doing that morning . Well I said at first I was doing pretty good or so I thought, but then I made the mistake of looking & watching you land fish after fish for this past hour, and even though I have 2 nice steelies, I'm pretty sure you already have your limit. He nodded and said he did, and was now releasing fish. I was about to ask him if he did anything different with his spawn when he beat me to the subject, and then offered up this little tidbit, he said he was reading a magazine article that said to change up your offering a little that you might want to try WD-40 for a different scent. Well I looked at this guy like he had two heads and belonged in a straight jacket, when he was just about ready to cast into the surf, he bent down over his bag & pulled out a mini can of ya you guessed it, good ol wd-40, sprayed his spawn bag and waded out to cast his offering . When He walked back up out of the water , I had said a few words indcating I believed he was just pulling my leg, and that if he didn't want me talking to him all he had to do was say so , and I would leave, with no-hard feelings. but wait he yelled, stay here it shouldn't take too long to prove to you I'm not kidding, Well he no sooner got the words out of his mouth ,when his surf rod was bucking like a brauma bull. After about what seemed like eternity, he finally landed an 8lb. steelhead that literally swallowed his wd-40 soaked spawn bag. The only thing I muttered to myself was well seeing is believing and right now I'm a believer. I just thought you guys might enjoy hearing and reading this story. All I can offer is this, I don't lie and I really don't make up stories, and yes, that probably sounds like an oxymoron, especially when you consider that I am an avid fisherman……..
And:
For the non believers of using WD-40 as an attractant . . .
Look what I just came across in a fishing.com article:
Wacky Baits
There appears to be no limit to what tempts catfish to bite. Outdoor writer John Phillips, for example, tells of a friend who had run out of bait and resorted to putting a chunk of road killed opossum on his hook. Although bizarre, the bait worked.
Excerpt:
That might seem amazing, but dead ’possum is run-of-the-mill compared to other baits. For example, applying Preparation H to plastic dipbait holders sometimes helps anglers catch more cats, perhaps because it contains shark liver oil. The lubricant, WD-40, is also widely known as a catfish attractor, despite the fact it doesn’t contain shark oil.
I fish with a very successful charter captain that sprays most of his salmon lures with the WD-40. I read somewhere of experiments placing the human hands in the hatchery raceway, then watching the fish in the raceway separate to avoid the scent of human L-Serine amino acid. Perhaps the WD-40 covers the human scent, but I don't know that for sure. Since muskies are high speed sight feeders, I really don't see too much need for washing dirty lures other than to bring back some of the colors as general care of the lures. Muskie lures are too darn expensive to abuse except for teeth marks.
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