Bait tub maintenance

It’s a great time to make sure your bait tub is cleaned up and stocked for the season. (Picture by Chris Burrows)

Probably every saltwater fishing boat in the Carolinas has a “bait-making” tub. If you use live bait at all, especially for king mackerel, then it’s a pretty good guess as to what’s in this plastic box.

You’ll probably have plastic spools wound with leaders and Clarkspoons, planers for those Clarkspoons, an assortment of Got-Cha plugs, some sabiki rigs, and some weights for those sabiki rigs. It’s a tried-and-true formula.

You can’t always catch bait in a cast net, and many times, the bait you catch with rod and reel works much better than menhaden, especially on bigger fall kings. Bluefish, Spanish, pinfish, and cigar minnows have all been the top bait on a leaderboard at one time or another. So, when you need this box, you search under every hatch on the boat and in the console until you find it. What kind of shape is it in right now?

The bait-making tub doesn’t usually get a lot of attention, until you need what’s in it. Since you generally have to bait up fairly quickly, you tend to need what’s in it in a hurry. When you’re done making bait, I believe a lot of people put everything back in the tub and stow it as quickly as they can, out of sight and out of mind. The next time it’s needed, sometimes an unwanted surprise is there, in the form of rust or tangles. Your bait making session just took a major hit. I learned this lesson the hard way.

Do it now

February is a great time to go ahead and bite the bullet with the tub. Block off an afternoon or evening, pull everything out and take stock of what you have versus what you think you will need for the season. The good news is that replacing bait-catching terminal tackle is fairly inexpensive, at least compared to most other tackle. Bluefish can decimate a collection of spoons or plugs very quickly, too. Once you’ve got your shopping list, it’s time to make sure what you still have is in the best condition it can possibly be in, and that it’s ready to catch fish.

Clarkspoons are one of the most useful lures ever made. For Spanish and bluefish, they are deadly. They have but one weak point, and that’s how the hook attaches to the body of the spoon. So often, the screw that holds the hook corrodes out, or the hook corrodes out around it. Go ahead and take all of your hooks off, and at the very least, inspect the screws and the threads. If it can be used again, sharpen the hooks and put them back together with some threadlocker glue. If you have any doubt, just get the kit and replace your hooks. If the spoon is on its last legs, or the screw just won’t tighten up, you can usually get one final use out of the spoon with a dab of J.B. Weld.

Clean, organize

Then, replace any chalky or nicked mono or fluorocarbon leaders on the spools. If no rust spots are on the snap swivels, a simple drop of oil will generally get them back to brand new condition. If you see rust, just replace. It doesn’t take long to have your Spanish mackerel gear shined up and ready to roll, with fresh leaders on clean spools.

Got-Cha plugs are a bit trickier to restore, because replacing hooks on them requires changing the wire on the plug. Treble hooks are also notoriously hard to sharpen, and their light wire design means that they don’t hold a hook point for long at all. If you don’t want to rewire the plugs, I have had a lot of success by simply cutting the old hooks off, then using a small split ring and a single hook as a replacement for the treble hooks. I don’t think it decreases my catch rate at all, and it is a lot easier to dehook a bluefish when there’s not a free-swinging treble on the other side of the plug. It’s a good time to shine up the plug bodies with a quick spray paint job as well.

Sabiki rigs are usually a single use (and discard) item, but you absolutely want them to be ready to go when needed. When the packs are simply tossed into the tub and left to flop around, things can go south pretty quickly. Add in a bit of saltwater in the tub from a quick bait making session and you can have them become useless before you even attempt to catch your cigar minnow. All it takes is a bit of moisture or high humidity in the box and the hooks rust out in no time. I sort mine by size and pack them in heavy-duty freezer packs, then squeeze the air out for an added layer of protection. It’s not completely bulletproof, but chances are, when it’s time to jig cigar minnows, they are going to pull out of those packs in much better shape than the one whose pack is crusted in salt and stuck to the side of the tub. I also make sure that my margarine tub is full of sabiki weights, in a handful of a couple of different sizes.

With those three items checked off of my list and ready to go, I feel a lot more confident about my bait catching game. I make sure the tub is completely dry before I put the lid back on, and away it goes. I might use it on the first trip of the season, or it might stay out of sight and (somewhat) out of mind until the fall. But when I do need it, I feel like it is going to pay off pretty quickly. With that matter put to bed and behind me, it might be a good time to try and soak that smell totally out of my cast net.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply