I’ve always been a bait dunker, and I probably always will be. This statement bothers two groups of trout anglers I come into contact with frequently. First, there are the fly fishers who practice catch-and-release religiously and look with disdain upon anyone who would stoop to bait fishing. The dilemma for them is that I’m also a fly fishing guide known for putting clients onto good trout on catch-and-release, ‘barbless-hook-artificials only’ waters like the East Carson River in Alpine County, California.

Then there are the trophy trout hunters who troll artificial lures on west coast lakes, catching many of the largest trout, and looking down upon those who deign to use bait. Problem here is that I’m known for trolling custom-made wooden minnow-plugs to great effect, catching monster mackinaw (lake trout) and quality rainbows and browns. Yet on any given day, you might find me guiding clients and writing about my experiences using live minnows and nightcrawlers as well.

Both of these groups laugh behind my back, then scratch their heads and wonder “What is wrong with that guy? Doesn’t he know that OUR group has the most fun and catches the best fish?” Some of them even have the nerve to share their limited worldview with me directly, and to those I say- “Purists get skunked more often.”

My earliest clear memories of fishing have me at age four or five, at a farm-pond outside Ithaca, New York where my grandparents lived. The farm’s owner granted us access and my grandfather had long cane-poles with no reels, just ten feet or so of line tied directly to the tips. A big red-and-white plastic bobber, snelled leader and hook made up the terminal tackle, and our bait was Wonder Bread. We took small pieces of the fluffy, white loaf and simply squeezed them down, back into dough balls that looked as if they could be left to rise and cooked again. Bread that’s good for you won’t work for this.

The fish in the farm pond went crazy for Wonder Bread, and when the bobber went down, we simply swung in bluegills the size of small dinner plates. My little sister always hooked the most (she fidgeted and moved the bobber around more than my patient brother and I), but she always screamed and dropped the pole when she lifted it and started a fat panfish on a pendulum-swing toward her face (you can’t blame her after the one that actually slapped her then slid inside her jacket).

Ever since then I’ve been hooked on bait, soaking worms in New Hampshire lakes for rainbow and brook trout, surfcasting live eels for striped bass on Cape Cod, drifting minnows and crayfish in Massachusetts rivers for smallmouth and channel catfish, and using many combinations of bait and fish attractants since moving to California. I’m sure there are as many bait fishing secrets are there anglers who use bait, but here are a few of my favorites for fooling west coast trout:

Powerbait- don’t expect a lot of brown trout and mackinaw on gobs of floating dough, but for planted and holdover rainbows it’s hard to beat this artificial bait. The usual method is to press a small ball of Powerbait around a tiny treble hook (size 14 to 16), hiding the hook completely. A two to three-foot leader of light (two to four-pound test) line, swivel, egg sinker and slightly heavier main line on spinning tackle complete the rig, which is cast out from shore or an anchored boat. The sinker goes to the lake floor and the Powerbait floats up, suspending above the sinker and bottom. Most anglers then close the reel’s bail and put the rod in a holder then wait for a bite. This tight-line method works well when trout are aggressive, but tentative fish will often tug against a tight line, lifting the sinker and bending the rod tip. Feeling this resistance, they will spit out the bait before the angler has a chance to set the hook. A stealthier method for these times is to leave the bail open and pull out a little line between the reel and the rod’s bottom guide. Put a loop of this line on the ground and place a small twig or pebble on it, pinning it down. When a trout bites, it will pull the line free, then feel no resistance as the line runs freely off the reel and through the hole in the egg sinker. By the time the angler picks up the rod, closes the bail and sets the hook, the trout will have traveled several feet with the bait and have it deep in its mouth or even in its stomach. This is a deadly technique, and I mean that literally, so don’t use it if you plan to catch-and-release.

Color choice can be important with Powerbait; you’d think red would be best, since it imitates a salmon egg and is a known aggression-triggering color (If it pisses off bulls and bees, why not trout?), but I’ve had my best success with chartreuse green. Go figure. Powerbait can also be fished in combination with a night crawler or salmon eggs; more on these great baits later!

Powerbait is also a good trolling attractant- I like to smear it on my dodger or flashers when trolling for rainbows- it dissolves slowly as the lure passes through the water, leaving a scent trail for fish to follow. Similarly, Rebel Crawfish plugs (which are excellent trolling lures for rainbows and cutthroat trout) have a small cavity at the rear, where the ‘pincers’ join. This spot can be filled with Powerbait, which will then emit scent for hours as you troll.

Nightcrawlers- where would the average trout angler be without this staple? I’ve also caught largemouth and smallmouth bass, bluegill, channel catfish, whitefish and suckers on them, which just goes to show that crawlers are a universal freshwater bait. Take a tub of worms to a hike-in trout lake at 12,000 feet where the fish have never seen such a bait, and watch them go crazy!

In streams and rivers, hook a mini-crawler through the collar with a # 8 or 10 bait holder hook, pinch a lead splitshot a foot or two up the line, and cast quartering upstream to current seams (where fast water meets slow), keeping a semi-tight line as the weight ticks bottom while drifting downstream. Add more or larger splitshot for faster water, and downsize or fish without any added weight in low, slow streams. In slack water in large river pools with a mud or sand bottom, try a heavier egg sinker ( ¼, ½ or even one ounce) with a swivel and leader. A key addition here is a shot of air to make the worm float up above the sinker, injected using a ‘wormblower’. This device (available at most stores with fishing tackle sections in the Tahoe area) is a small soft-plastic squeeze bottle tipped with a hypodermic needle. Poke the needle into a night crawler, squeeze the bottle gently, and you’ll fill your worm with a bubble of air that floats it up off the bottom. As with Powerbait, this allows you to present your offering above rocks, mud and weeds, where a trout can more easily find it.

For lake fishing with nightcrawlers I would recommend the same technique, and offer a few more tips. The slip-sinker, inflated worm scenario I just described could take any species of trout here in California, but it can be made even more effective at times with a few extra ‘bells and whistles’. First, I’ve found an even better tool than the worm blower, the Pro-Cure bait oil injector. This is essentially a jumbo version of the same device, with a larger gauge hypodermic needle. It’s designed to inject Pro-Cure bait scents into worms and live or dead minnows, but it also does a fine job of injecting air into night crawlers. With a Pro-Cure injector half-full of bait oil, you can tip the squeeze bottle up and squirt some fish-attracting oil into your night crawler, then turn the needle-end up and inject a bubble of air into the crawler as well. This will float the worm and allow it to leak a trail of fish-attracting scent at the same time.

So why not just use a regular wormblower to inject scent along with the air bubbles? Simply because the needle on a standard worm blower is too small, and it clogs easily if used for injecting anything thicker than pure air. The Pro-Cure injector’s larger, heavier gauge needle will allow viscous liquids to pass through. Salmon egg oil is my favorite ‘Cajun flavor injection’ for rainbow trout, while I’ve found brown trout often prefer shrimp or herring oil.

So far we’ve just been talking about drifting or soaking worms, but the fine art of trolling nightcrawlers deserves some space here as well. As with the other methods, there are many productive variations to the techniques I mention, and I will only describe one approach here, in an already lengthy article. I usually troll night crawlers behind attractor lures, adding about twenty inches of leader for a 4/0 dodger, and as long as three to four feet for a set of flashers. Tie the leader with lighter line than your main line; I like six-pound fluorocarbon, tied to a #6 Gamakatsu baitholder hook.

My usual method is to pinch off the head of the night crawler and toss it into the lake as an offering to the fish. Then I take the tail section (one-half to two-thirds of the original worm, depending on its size) and thread it onto the hook using a wormthreader. If you haven’t tried one of these nifty little devices, you need to do so and explain to your uncle or grandpa that the days of hand-threading worms onto hooks are over! Check out www.wormthreader.net for a tutorial.

I like to just cover the shank of the hook with the upper part of the worm, and leave a long flapping tail extending past the hook, like the tail on a soft-plastic bass-fishing grub. This creates a natural, undulating motion in the water, but if the trout strike short and bite off the tail, missing the hook, leave a shorter tail and thread the worm up the leader two or three inches. Some anglers thread a whole night crawler onto the leader, leaving no tail at all past the hook bend, but I find this causes the worm to slide down the leader and bunch up from water pressure as I troll. This looks much less natural than a worm with a free-swinging tail. A better option is to add a small stinger hook on a short leader tied to the bend of the first hook. With the first hook threaded onto the front of the worm and the stinger embedded in the tail, you’ll have set a trap from which few trout could escape.

An injection of Pro-Cure bait oil or sauce is an excellent addition to a trolled night crawler; it will leave a scent-trail for trout to follow, and if a fish nips at the bait it will release a burst of attractant, which can cause it to hit again, more aggressively. Remember that night crawlers must be trolled slowly, one mile-per-hour or less in most situations, for best results. Another great addition to a trolled worm is a salmon egg or two to hide the hook point.

This brings me to the caviar of trout baits, the incredible, edible egg. Rolled along the river bottom on a tiny hook or coupled with an inflated night crawler for the classic ‘Sierra Cocktail’, a jar of good salmon eggs is another essential tool for the bait-fishing trout angler. My favorite brand of cured individual eggs is Pautzke’s, but I also like Pro-Cure’s whole skeins of cured eggs, which can be cut into small pieces which have an incredible ‘milking’ action, giving off clouds of white effluent into the water when skewered on a hook.

Corn- Kokanee salmon have a strange penchant for canned Green Giant white shoepeg corn. A kernel of this vegetable on your hook when fishing kokanee bugs or spinners will often improve your catch rate considerably. I figure the whitish dot is a visual attractant, and the soft texture and salty-sweet juice reminds a salmon of the freshwater shrimp it normally eats (it’s not as if there are wild schools of corn kernels swimming around the lake). I like to further this illusion by soaking my corn in Pro-Cure shrimp oil. Corn is also a great addition to a trolled night crawler. On Boca Reservoir I’ve trolled night crawlers and caught only rainbow trout, then trolled kokanee lures with corn, catching only kokanee, but when I tried adding corn to my hook along with a threaded worm, I started catching both species!

Crayfish- whole, live crayfish have caught me many large catfish and smallmouth bass, and fresh tail-meat from a large crayfish is an effective add-on to a trolled or still-fished night crawler when pursuing trout as well.

Mealworms, crickets, grubs and larvae you find when you turn over a rotten log in the woods- Yes, of course, and use an appropriately tiny hook. Light-wire dry fly fishing hooks work great for bug baits.

Minnows- live minnows are legal for use as bait in only three lakes in the California DFG Sierra District, Tahoe, Donner and Fallen Leaf. There are however a number of trout lakes in other districts where various baitfish are permitted, and statewide, dead saltwater fish may be used in any lake where bait is allowed. For a detailed description of minnow fishing here in the Tahoe area, check out my article “Fishing With Minnows.”

I’m going to skip marshmallows, cocktail shrimp, kokanee heads and live chipmunks for trophy brown trout, wrapping up instead with a way to turn artificial lures into bait.

Add some stink! I cover all my trolling lures with Pro-Cure bait scents, but I can’t prove my catches have increased because my friends, clients and I hook so many big fish with scented lures that nobody wants to be the ‘control’ in a scientific test, using a non-scented lure to see if it works better. Seriously, most of my largest trout have been caught on scented lures or bait, proving at least to me that trout are a lot more like catfish than all the snobby fly fishermen would like to admit.

My preferred scents include Pro-Cure trophy trout sauce (made with whole, ground tui-chubs, a favored prey species for large trout), herring oil, and shrimp and prawn oil. I have had great success in recent months trolling on Tahoe using AC Plugs and Rapalas coated with scent. These fish-attractant products are useful in several ways-

An angler handling lures can transfer a variety of fish-repelling odors to the baits, including sunscreen, gasoline, and sweat. Fish attractant scents can help cover these negative influences.

Large minnow plugs need to be trolled at an upbeat pace, two to four miles-per-hour or more to catch big trout in most situations. At this speed it’s unlikely that fish are just following the scent-trail, trying to catch up to the source of the delicious smell before it’s gone. I believe the visual appeal and vibration of a fast-moving plug do most of the work in attracting trout, but at the last second before the strike, scents can either cause the fish to commit or turn away. This is especially true when an angler trolls through the area only once, but if you turn around and re-troll a key area repeatedly, especially if you stop and add fresh scent before each run, expect a chumming effect where the bite improves on each pass, as the trout have time to ‘catch a whiff’ and come looking for the source of the scent.

Minnows, nightcrawlers and slow-troll lures like flashers, dodgers, Flatfish and Kwikfish allow the trout just that much more time to sniff out the source of an appealing scent. I usually troll these offerings at speeds of .5 to 1.2 miles-per-hour, and even the laziest trout could follow the scent-trail at these speeds. As with fast-troll lures, the more times you buzz through an area with a fresh load of attractant on your baits, the more you can expect trout to be alert for the same scent passing through again. I’ve had days where I couldn’t get a hit on my first pass through a key area, but after soaking my baits with attractant on each pass, the fishing improved dramatically, with the bite becoming more aggressive and the size of the trout increasing as well. My best day ever trolling for Tahoe rainbow trout involved passing back and forth over one shallow, rocky area for most of the morning. My fishing partner and I stopped at each end of a five-minute troll (if we made it that far), and squirted another liberal dose of Pro-Cure herring oil onto our dodgers and minnows. We caught over twenty rainbows from one to six pounds that day, and I’ve also netted my largest Tahoe rainbow and brown trout on scented baits.

The Pro-Cure bait injector is the best tool for adding scent to trolled night crawlers and minnows; worms should be injected near the end of the tail, while baitfish should be injected through the mouth, until the attractant begins leaking out the minnow’s anal vent. Yes, bait fishing is a nasty, messy business. Squeamish anglers are welcome to turn away at this point so I can hook that many more big trout without competition.

This winter and early spring on Lake Tahoe I’ve been catching trophy brown trout and mackinaw on Rapalas, Bombers and AC Plugs coated with attractant, while two-to-three pound rainbow trout have been hammering scent-injected minnows. On a recent trip to Indian Creek Reservoir in Alpine County, I helped my daughter Arielle celebrated her eighth birthday by having her catch several football-fat holdover rainbows on still-fished night crawlers. These two different scenarios bring me to my final tip for bait anglers: Use this knowledge wisely; don’t go over to the dark side.

When wild Tahoe trout strike scented lures and trolled baits they very rarely swallow a hook; most are easily released with a pair of needle nose pliers.

Indian Creek Reservoir trout though will slurp down and quickly swallow worms or Powerbait fished off the bottom as I’ve described. These fish with hooks embedded in their throats or stomachs are poor candidates for release, but this fishery is entirely sustained by hatchery plants, with no natural spawning and reproduction. My point is that the ethical angler needs to choose where and when to use bait. If the method used will allow easy release of fish hooked only in the mouth, or when the trout caught are purely hatchery products, meant to be caught and kept by anglers, by all means, use bait. If however you find a wild-trout stream or lake fishery where trout take baits quickly and deeply, please consider barbless hooks, artificial lures and other methods that will allow catch-and-release fishing.

Our wild trout are an extremely limited resource- a good friend of mine recently fished the Sierra stream trout opener on a small creek that feeds a large lake, a spot where he has caught and released many wild fish on barbless flies in the past. This year though, he was greeted early in the morning by a gauntlet of bait dunkers, many of whom were filling stringers with wild rainbow and brown trout to over twenty inches. The rainbows run up this tributary to spawn, and fall-spawning brown trout follow them in the high, springtime flows to feed on minnows, insects and rainbow trout eggs and fry.

I will not name the lake, for fear of more bait-fishing pressure in the creek, but let me tell you that the next few years of rainbow and brown trout fishing here have been compromised by just the fish that were yanked out on opening day, 2006.

Why doesn’t the California Department of Fish and Game restrict fishing in areas like this? Good question; guides and concerned catch-and-release anglers have been asking for no-kill regulations or closed seasons in sensitive areas near Lake Tahoe for quite a few years with little or no response. So it’s up to you! Use bait and keep fish where hatchery trout are supplied, try artificial lures, barbless hooks and careful release techniques where wild trout are abundant, and learn to discern the difference between the two!

Until Next Time!
Mark (Never Stand In A Canoe) Wiza
Pro-Staff for AC Plugs and Pro-Cure Bait Scents

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Mark is a licensed fishing guide offering light-tackle adventures in the Tahoe area. Hot trips this spring include canoe or small boat trips for trophy trout and on-the-water fishing seminars for boaters on Lake Tahoe. Call (530) 545-1475 Email Mark for details.