The Art of Stickbaiting.

[Robert Palcak]

Hi All

I just got back from a fishing trip and had an awesome time. I will put up a report and pics soon.

Most of our time we spent working poppers, however, we did have a bit of a dabble with Stickbaits with reasonably good results.
While working our stickbaits, it did occur to me more than once that we really did have no idea on how we should be working our stickbaits.
We varied the speed for Orion bigfoots and wound Adhek Long Goby's in at a med -> fast retrieve and they both got eaten.
We played around with other stickbaits and they seemed to skitter along ok, but we really didn't know what a properly worked stickbait should look like?

So my first question is...
What does everyone use and how do they work them?
also...
What makes/models of rods do people use and why?... as in what makes it an ideal stickbait rod?

Cheers Rob

[Jon Li]

With Wahoo , I use stroking action n with Ulua I use twitching action .

Jon .

[Jay Burgess]

From my understanding a stickbait rod generally has a softer tip than most of your conventional chugging rods. This is what makes the Komodo Dragon ideal for stickbaits (generally, larger sinking stickbaits like orion bigfoots). Personally, I think a stickbait should swim. I've heard of alot of people using them in a similar fashion to pencils and I'm sure they get results but to me this kinda defeats the purpose of using a stickbait. For bigfoots I use a slow sideways sweep of the rod to get the stickbait to swim nicely, kinda similar to the way I'd bloop a chugger only slightly slower and with a bit less ooomph. I tend to steer away from surface stickbaits only because I think they require a higher level of skill to work properly and because I don't have a surface stickbait rod.

[David Sharples]

My thinking on this is that with bigfoots and wahoos, those that sink, you can fish them well even when the boat moves slowly along the reef. The bigfoot is best for this and will swim even when the movement of the boat causes a bow in the line and prevents you from throwing slack into the presentation. Both of these fish well with sweeps of the rod but you must watch how you make it swim as too hard a sweep can cause the lures to flip or swim un-naturally.

With floating stickbaits like Uluas and the floating Craftbait I find it easier to work these when the boat is either stationary or hardly moving and where the water is flatter. The Craftbait has a nice tight wiggle when you sweep it but will come to the surface easily in a chop. The ulua seems to look best with gentler twitches and its nice to be able to allow slack between twitches to let it swing. I tried fishing both of these in maldives while the boat was moving and it was very difficult,. They seemed a bad lure choice for this situation.