Quick Hit at the S.I.S.S.

I tried the Hills at lunch today, and though the tide was incoming and strong, the bite was absent. I'm going to skip the drawn out explanation of how and why I didn't catch any fish and just say that the highlight of the hour I spent fishing was when I found a slip-bobber floating in the river. I scooped it up and headed back to work.


Yesterday I stopped by my local tackle shop, "Minnows & Monsters" and picked up a couple of rods I had left to be either repaired, respooled with 10lb braid, or both. While I was there, I picked up a couple of 5/8oz Gotcha lures. These were slightly different than the others I've bought in two distinct ways.


1) Instead of two treble hooks, the rear was replaced with a J-hook, and
2) There was a white bucktail tied on to cover the above-referenced J-hook.

See below:

I was chomping at the bit to toss this little sucker out, but my skunking on the Hills got me thinking that perhaps this modified Gotcha was still on the shelf at the tackle shop for a reason.

To further test out the lure, I ran by the Snell Isle Secret Spot for a quick thirty minutes of casting.

On my first cast, I hooked up with a big trout, and from what I could tell, it was going to be my elusive first keeper of the season. In my excitement, I horsed it a bit more than I should have, and the hook slipped when the fish was still 10 yards out from the dock. Damn.

My disappointment didn't last long, though, as my next cast netted a 15 inch ladyfish. There were a couple of guys fishing from the seawall, and the lady caught their attention. When I reeled in another ladyfish on my next cast, they packed up their stuff and left. (Sorry guys, didn't mean to rub it in your face.)

In the next twenty or so minutes, I would land three more ladyfish and another trout, bringing my total landed to six fish.

I worked the Gotcha in a variety of different retrieves, from a fast pop-pop-reel to a slow pop-pause-reel. Both caught fish, and neither seemed to have a particular advantage over the other.

The most interesting thing to come up today with the new Gotcha was that I caught all six fish on the front treble hook. Not one took the J-hook at the back of the lure. I did have several hits without hook-ups, so I wonder if the fish weren't having a hard time latching on to the rear hook. Or, it could be that all the fish were going for the kill shot and hitting the lure in the head, therefore getting the front treble. It's a headscratcher.