Bucho
Member
Its been a while since I started experimenting with Mold-modulating. Back then, with the help of an engraver who has meanwhle retired and left me his machine for a few hundred bucks 
. The single most phenomenal success - both fishing and commercial wise - was an up-side-down wobble jig head. Coated with yellow powder paint and tipped with a lugworm or ragworm, the bare jig head is a flounder killer. Even in dead calm gin clear shallow water, when flatties are dug in to their noses and no one would even think of productive ground baiting, it just kills them. Now when I say flounder I am speaking of small mouthed invertebrate feeding dab, plaice and european flounder, all of which would compare rather to winter flounder than the piscavorous sandeel-feeding fluke .
Looking for a lure that would get along without bait to tip it - fresh ragworm is expensive and cannot be stored - I had a customer tying long, double hooked seatrout/ragworm fly patterns to them and he reported that the flounder would always hit the front hook, never the stinger. This let me to the assumption that they perceive the small flat bright jig as a small flattie struggling to bite of a large worm. So when they come in to steal the worm, they always grab the front end to get the better part of it. This made my commercial adaptation a lot easier - I just tied a simple zonker strip to the jig that worked perfectly and made for the first reliable artificial bait for small mouthed flounder - ever.
Now besides these commonly known small mouthed flatties, we have some very rarely caught, very delicious, highly apreciated 100% piscavorious ones named turbot. These are not even as rare as everybody thinks but differ from the above in several ways, mainly their complete desinterest for rug- and lugworm which make for 99% of groundbait being used here. Last year I was surprised to learn that a charter boat captain uses my lugworm tipped jigs to catch good numbers of better sized atlantic cod in the 5-10lbs range which is known to clearly prefer fish bait or lures over groundbait that would rather get numbers than size. I didn´t pay much attention to that until I received a fishing report from a customer who caught a specimen sized turbot together with a respectable bag of flounder.
Since I´ve heard that tubot caught at this time of year forage not only on sandeel but also on juvenile flounder, this explains the success of this jig that triggers strikes from both food-envy small mouthed flatties and larger predators which don´t bother to envy the small flounder for their prey but simply bust them altogether.
So If you have access to inshore flounder of any kind, think of it, its a phantastic light fishing. The small head rigged on light tackle travels surprisingly deep into the water. Since you don´t need to go 100% vertical and sandbanks usually have no cross-rurrents, you can usually drift a 3/8th jig head over 50`of water. A third of that depth will usually suffice.
BTW my team angler Malte likes to hang out at marinas at night and cast glow versions of it at cod, specimen flonder and even pollock which move in there after dark. A subtle blue glow is the ticket. He and his buddy catch far more and better fish in a few hours on light tackle than the guests of the party boats that leave from there for offshore day tips...
. The single most phenomenal success - both fishing and commercial wise - was an up-side-down wobble jig head. Coated with yellow powder paint and tipped with a lugworm or ragworm, the bare jig head is a flounder killer. Even in dead calm gin clear shallow water, when flatties are dug in to their noses and no one would even think of productive ground baiting, it just kills them. Now when I say flounder I am speaking of small mouthed invertebrate feeding dab, plaice and european flounder, all of which would compare rather to winter flounder than the piscavorous sandeel-feeding fluke .Looking for a lure that would get along without bait to tip it - fresh ragworm is expensive and cannot be stored - I had a customer tying long, double hooked seatrout/ragworm fly patterns to them and he reported that the flounder would always hit the front hook, never the stinger. This let me to the assumption that they perceive the small flat bright jig as a small flattie struggling to bite of a large worm. So when they come in to steal the worm, they always grab the front end to get the better part of it. This made my commercial adaptation a lot easier - I just tied a simple zonker strip to the jig that worked perfectly and made for the first reliable artificial bait for small mouthed flounder - ever.
Now besides these commonly known small mouthed flatties, we have some very rarely caught, very delicious, highly apreciated 100% piscavorious ones named turbot. These are not even as rare as everybody thinks but differ from the above in several ways, mainly their complete desinterest for rug- and lugworm which make for 99% of groundbait being used here. Last year I was surprised to learn that a charter boat captain uses my lugworm tipped jigs to catch good numbers of better sized atlantic cod in the 5-10lbs range which is known to clearly prefer fish bait or lures over groundbait that would rather get numbers than size. I didn´t pay much attention to that until I received a fishing report from a customer who caught a specimen sized turbot together with a respectable bag of flounder.
Since I´ve heard that tubot caught at this time of year forage not only on sandeel but also on juvenile flounder, this explains the success of this jig that triggers strikes from both food-envy small mouthed flatties and larger predators which don´t bother to envy the small flounder for their prey but simply bust them altogether.
So If you have access to inshore flounder of any kind, think of it, its a phantastic light fishing. The small head rigged on light tackle travels surprisingly deep into the water. Since you don´t need to go 100% vertical and sandbanks usually have no cross-rurrents, you can usually drift a 3/8th jig head over 50`of water. A third of that depth will usually suffice.
BTW my team angler Malte likes to hang out at marinas at night and cast glow versions of it at cod, specimen flonder and even pollock which move in there after dark. A subtle blue glow is the ticket. He and his buddy catch far more and better fish in a few hours on light tackle than the guests of the party boats that leave from there for offshore day tips...
