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| A number of times over the years I have read guys on here say, 'don't give up if you get a dawg ball, keep working it!'. I always thought that it was not a real dawg ball, because what fish would hit that mess. Well, last night fishing in the rain on league night I saw it first hand. My partner got a dawg ball, but kept working it and then close to the boat a musky hit. Unfortunately, it went airborne and came unpinned. When he brought the lure in, the hooks were around the leader, the tail was twisted under the leader, a real mess. We speculated that it would be very hard to get a hook in the fish with that mess.
Since he had the same thing happen the day before, we joked that maybe we should just twist it all together before throwing it out. Don't leave it to chance. |
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Posts: 2373
Location: Chisholm, MN | The truth is that a dawg ball attracts a ton of attention by pushing a lot more water than it would coming in straight. The bad part is hook up percentages are almost zero. If you do get bit, it's also more likely that a fish could cut your line since your leader is balled up on the bait. That's why I always pull in the bait as fast as possible to avoid getting bit and maybe have a chance at the fish, if there was one nearby, to eat the bait not dawg balled. The main thing to note is that the bigger baits pushing a lot of water are really effective at attracting fish. It seems like you get a disproportionately larger amount of follows on dawg balled baits that not. So big baits equal more encounters. |
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| Thanks for the explanation Kirby. We both looked at the mess after the fish got off and thought it would have taken a miracle to get a good hookset the way things were tangled up. I have had it where it was just the tip of the tail on a rear hook, that I could see a fish hitting and getting hooked but not the tangled mess my buddy had, with leader and tail all tangled in hooks. |
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Location: Athens, Ohio | I recall fishing at Splitrock Point on Sab Bay. Got my bait hung up in a bunch of weeds and then a muskie tried to eat it! There weren't hooks within two inches of that fish's jaw due to all the shrubbery. m |
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Posts: 32923
Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin | "If it moves, it's food."
Doug Johmson |
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| Steve, I agree and have quoted that wise fisherman myself. However, the question my partner and I had was why were the only two fish he moved in two days hitting a balled up mess, instead of all the other baits thrown. |
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Posts: 1540
Location: Brighton CO. | When my dad was a young guy in the early 50's he knew a guy at work who caught a 30 pound Muskie on a surfacebait that had a wad of weeds on it and he was burning it in to get the weeds off when the fish hit. |
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