Non-Fly Mooching?

Stonedfish said:
Another mooching story.
Early 80's out at West Point fishing with my then girlfriends brother.
He hooks up, plays it for awhile and up pops a seal pup. Hooked right in the mouth.
He starts asking for the net. I'm like WTF, you aren't bring that in the boat? He says he is.
As he reached for the net, I grab the herring knife and cut his leader right below his weight.
He was pissed. I just shook my head......
SF
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What the fuck was he going to do with it? Just wanted his hooks back?
 
SeaRunner said:
Not sure it is a funny story, but a story nonetheless. I was out this past summer at Jeff. Dead calm day and there were ribbons and pockets of small red amphipod-looking things on the surface, with large schools of dogfish and some herring showing on the surface as they gulped them down. I managed to get on a boiling herring ball and hooked up a decent king who after fighting around the boat a bit decided to run and then head for the surface. I had gotten him turned and was bringing him in near the surface when the thumping of the fish turned to dead weight for a few seconds and then pop, nothing.

I reeled in to find my leader broken about 2 inches below the weight, a sliding metzler flash bar weight. Now I can't prove it, but my guess is that one of those surface feeding dogfish decided to eat that flash bar and then chewed through the leader. I have pulled salmon in with dogfish chewing on their tails so it seems plausible. The only other thing I can think of is that the leader got wrapped around the flash bar at some point in the fight (it can happen) and then eventually cut through. But every story needs a villain.
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I was fishing flounder with my son and I had a dog fish take a bite out of one of the fish. It followed the flounder all the way to the surface and the dog fish swam around the boat. We had just finished trolling and I still had my downrigger weight in the water so that dogfish turned and I just turned around a took a bite of my downrigger ball. So this doesn't surprise me. I hope it broke a tooth
 
Greg Armstrong said:
I just looked up the Winona. Thats a great looking old Heddon made reel. Says they were made between 1948 and 1962. They made some in stainless steel for a short time too.

Would be pretty fun to hook a nice King using one of these reels!
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Another "old" mooching reel is the Goite "Indiana style" reel. Pretty sure they were in production until 1940-ish...My Pa had a box of 'em, he loved mooching on the sound with that kinda gear. Growing up, my grandparents had a place on the beach within spittin' distance of Pt Williams (Lincoln Park), and Pa kept a 12' Lund with an ancient Evinrude 10hp in the yard there - pretty easy to throw over the bulkhead and beach-launch. In the 70's, all a fella had to do to find good July-Sept fishing was motor straight off the beach until you got to the first decent tide rip, then shut 'er off and drown a herring.

I got this one from my Pa's collection in 2015, spiffed it up with a stiff toothbrush and some lube, relined it with some mono that WASN'T from the 70's, then took it out and got my knuckles wrecked by a mid-20's king in June 2016. I put it back on the shelf - while I do appreciate tradition and old gear, I like my Bantam 50's waaaay better for mooching. Unless you do colored line segments (ew), count revolutions (slow and boooooring), or do rod lift-drops on the way down (clunky), you don't have a good sense of how much line is off the reel, and in the weird currents and sub-counter-currents of SE AK, if you ain't in the zone, you ain't fishin.
Goite.jpg
 
G_Smolt said:
Another "old" mooching reel is the Goite "Indiana style" reel. Pretty sure they were in production until 1940-ish...My Pa had a box of 'em, he loved mooching on the sound with that kinda gear. Growing up, my grandparents had a place on the beach within spittin' distance of Pt Williams (Lincoln Park), and Pa kept a 12' Lund with an ancient Evinrude 10hp in the yard there - pretty easy to throw over the bulkhead and beach-launch. In the 70's, all a fella had to do to find good July-Sept fishing was motor straight off the beach until you got to the first decent tide rip, then shut 'er off and drown a herring.

I got this one from my Pa's collection in 2015, spiffed it up with a stiff toothbrush and some lube, relined it with some mono that WASN'T from the 70's, then took it out and got my knuckles wrecked by a mid-20's king in June 2016. I put it back on the shelf - while I do appreciate tradition and old gear, I like my Bantam 50's waaaay better for mooching. Unless you do colored line segments (ew), count revolutions (slow and boooooring), or do rod lift-drops on the way down (clunky), you don't have a good sense of how much line is off the reel, and in the weird currents and sub-counter-currents of SE AK, if you ain't in the zone, you ain't fishin.
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Great stories and that is one cool ass reel.
SF
 
3 of us were trolling the PNP - Pilot Pt track on a nice mid September day in the mid 90’s. One of the guys was seriously into the barley pops and had faded badly and was snoring in the cabin. We filleted a nice coho and securely hooked the carcass up to a flasher/hoochie and sent it down on the downrigger. We then rudely woke our sleeping drunk up and told him he had a fish on and to come and deal with it. After struggling with the fish and getting it to the boat, netted, and brought on board, he stared at the carcass thru his bleary eyes, and said “how in hell could a fish in that condition bite.”.
 
Wolverine said:
3 of us were trolling the PNP - Pilot Pt track on a nice mid September day in the mid 90’s. One of the guys was seriously into the barley pops and had faded badly and was snoring in the cabin. We filleted a nice coho and securely hooked the carcass up to a flasher/hoochie and sent it down on the downrigger. We then rudely woke our sleeping drunk up and told him he had a fish on and to come and deal with it. After struggling with the fish and getting it to the boat, netted, and brought on board, he stared at the carcass thru his bleary eyes, and said “how in hell could a fish in that condition bite.”.
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That reminds me of the time my dad's buddy fell asleep with his rod in the rod holder. They reeled it up and hooked a dodger to it and dropped it back down. They woke him up frantically telling him he had a bite.
 
Anyone use a brads cut plugs for mooching? Thinking about heading out tomorrow and having my son throw one where I don't have to worry about him doing something weird to the bait.
 
It's my preferred method for fishing kings and also how I get my halibut (SE Alaska). I don't target the halibut, but just pick them up incidental to the salmon. 90% of the time I'm using a 4 oz. mooching weight, the rest of the time a 3 or 5 oz.
 
ThatGuyRyRy said:
Anyone use a brads cut plugs for mooching? Thinking about heading out tomorrow and having my son throw one where I don't have to worry about him doing something weird to the bait.
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The state record was caught doing exactly that! The state record staghorn sculpin that is 🤣
 
ThatGuyRyRy said:
Anyone use a brads cut plugs for mooching? Thinking about heading out tomorrow and having my son throw one where I don't have to worry about him doing something weird to the bait.
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Not mooching, but have seen people have success with them off the beaches.
I was fishing next to a gal at a popular coho beach and she hooked up three nice coho in a short period of time using a silver one.
SF
 
My grandpa gave me his bamboo mooching rods this year from his childhood that my great grandfather built way back when. Not exactly sure how old these bad boys are, but my grandpa caught his first brace of salmon on em in the late 30’s early 40’s fishing in front of Scott Paper in Everett. They are heavy, unruly beasts with a permanent bend in the tip from soaking lead and catching hogs but they are so cool. Just for fun I tried spey casting them in the yard, they are something else, I could launch a 630gr skagit head and 15’ of t17 across my yard, casting overhead lol. Man gear has come a long way since then. The mooching reel he gave me is similar to what G smolt posted above. I’ll have to clean that reel up and get it lined and fish it.

32702273-4DF8-43F5-9BAC-D23595D23AFD.jpeg
 
ThatGuyRyRy said:
Anyone use a brads cut plugs for mooching? Thinking about heading out tomorrow and having my son throw one where I don't have to worry about him doing something weird to the bait.
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I have some soft plastic swimbaits that I have attempted to mooch with a couple of times. They look great to me, though the salmon don‘t seem to feel the same. Soft plastic cut-plug? Somebody must have tried it. The fish would probably hold on for longer than the microsecond it takes for them to spit out a hard bait.
If you are using bait and worried about its durability, helmets of various types help a lot. I use them for trolling real bait and it works.
 
I remember drowning bait for salmon, cod, or anything that would bite. Occasionally a salmon would meet its demise, but mostly it was dog fish that would grab the bait.
 
For those that tie their own leaders:

One of the best tips I got long ago is a really simple one. Make enough wraps when tying the trailer (bottom) hook so that the tag end is completely covered by the wraps. This eliminates the stiff tag end from sticking out like a barb which will often gouge a hole in your bait, especially if your bait is a little on the soft side. Besides making a leader that's easier to bait and easier on your bait, it eliminates one step (trimming the tag) from the overall process.
 
Creatch’r said:
My grandpa gave me his bamboo mooching rods this year from his childhood that my great grandfather built way back when. Not exactly sure how old these bad boys are, but my grandpa caught his first brace of salmon on em in the late 30’s early 40’s fishing in front of Scott Paper in Everett. They are heavy, unruly beasts with a permanent bend in the tip from soaking lead and catching hogs but they are so cool. Just for fun I tried spey casting them in the yard, they are something else, I could launch a 630gr skagit head and 15’ of t17 across my yard, casting overhead lol. Man gear has come a long way since then. The mooching reel he gave me is similar to what G smolt posted above. I’ll have to clean that reel up and get it lined and fish it.

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That rod is pretty sweet. If the reel you have doesn't work out you could put a wooden Peetz reel on it and you'd have a mooching outfit and fish bonker all in one lol.
 
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