A New Tip from "The Thinking Man"

I'm talking about none other than my friend, Charlie. He comes up with ideas, even when he isn't trying, and that's exactly how he came up with his latest suggestion that I'm going to share here. I just want everyone to be clear--Charlie deserves all the credit.

As anyone who follows Charlie's blog already knows, he likes to fish a beetle spin like the one in this photo. He's had one problem with them, though: One in every six casts finds his braided line wrapping around the blade arm. That was until his fishing trip yesterday.

He had been using a Texas-rigged plastic with a 1/8-oz. bullet weight pegged against the hook with a bobber stop. When he decided to switch to a beetle spin, he didn't want to remove the bobber stop because he knew he might be going back to the soft plastic. So he just left the bobber stop attached.

In the next hour, as he was fishing the beetle spin with the bobber stop (look closely in this photo, and you'll see the bobber stop), he came to realize that the blade arm hadn't wrapped in the line once. Said Charlie, "I don't know why it worked, but I sure was glad it did. From now on, I'll use a bobber stop on any bait with an arm and blade."

Charlie admits his newfound "fix" needs further study, and he's going to do that study. While he's at it, he's going to test the idea on crankbaits, too. As I explained to him, I have a similar problem with crankbaits in which the front hook sets way forward on the bait. My braid constantly wraps around the hook in such cases. I'll let y'all know the results of Charlie's study.

Incidentally, Charlie always has used bobber stops, instead of toothpicks, to peg his sinkers because, as he aptly noted, toothpicks cause your line to fray. Back in the day when I pegged sinkers, I always used cut-up pieces of rubber bands--another good way to avoid frayed line.