Fish Sniffer On Demand Digital Edition Issue 3625 Nov 24- Dec8 2017 | Page 30

28 Nov. 24 - Dec. 8, 2017 BAJA ROUNDUP VOL.36 • ISS. 25 Vol. 36 - Iss. 25 Pg. 26 BAJA TIP OF THE WEEK Wahoo are a great trophy for anglers visiting the Baja Peninsula, but few anglers really understand how to target these great eating, fast swimming gamefish. Standard offshore trolling tackle works fine for Wahoo. You can troll with 100 lb braided line. When you are casting for them, you can use medium conventional tackle with 80lb braid or so. Whatever you are using, make sure you are using a wire leader. A Shimano Trinidad 30 is good for casting and an Accurate BX2 30 is great for trolling. The vast majority of wahoo are caught by trolling. You can’t troll too fast for Wahoo. In general, if you want to target Wahoo you should troll faster and closer to the boat than you would for other species. For trolling, you can try Rapalas and any other swimming plugs that can be trolled rapidly. Braid Maurader or Yo-Zuri Bonita lures work very well. Wahoo sometimes attached plastic skirted trolling lures but they shred them to bits so that gets expensive fast. Wahoo will certainly grab baits such as Pacific Mackerel although they can be tricky to hook this way. Baits do not move quickly like the lures used for them and so they have more time to inspect them and see the wire leader and shy away. Fake Worms Get Real Results F irst of all, let me start by saying that I have not had a good relationship with the company called Berkley and I don’t know why. The company was started in 1937 by a young lad who worked in his garage tying flies with hair from his dog and feathers from some nearby chickens. The flies were a local success and he branched out into making wire leaders for pike fishing, silkworm gut leaders, and hiring some local teens to tie flies. These were the humble beginnings for what was to become a fishing business giant. Who can disparage an all-American business success story, right? Well, maybe my problem was that I didn’t like any of their nylon monofila- ment lines. Whether it was their XL, TX, or XT lines, I hated them all. Every ... single ... one. And maybe I allowed that to cloud my judgment of all their other fine products. (OK, lines are a very personal matter, I know. Berkley sells tons of line, so a lot of people like them; and their opinion is more important to Berkley than my opinion since it pays their bills.) I first started softening my opinion on Berkley products when they came out with their now rightly famous Power Bait paste for trout fishing. Power Bait is by far the best paste style bait for trout and I have caught my share of trout on that bait. My only double digit largemouth bass was also caught on spring green colored Power Bait in an incident I don’t want to comment much on. (And yes, as much as I make fun of trout fishing, I do go trout fishing on occasion. With Power Bait. Sitting in a chair.) Which brings us to the present. I have been eyeing Berkley’s offering to the salt water fishing world for some time now, but haven’t yet tried it. Berkley’s Gulp Sandworm in camo color is the most realistic representation of a pile worm I have seen. It is basic knowledge that pile worms are an absolutely deadly bait for surf perch and many other species. It is also basic knowledge that pile worms are now hard to find, expensive, and absolutely icky to use. Could this bait fill in for the real stuff? That question was answered for me by my fishing pals Billy D and Buddy-X. I was invited to a beach outing with them as the perch have been biting well as of late. This was totally reasonable as the striped bass have abandoned the beaches on their way back up to the delta. With a lack of predators to bother them, the perch were free to roam the suds. The two were using what has become the standard surf perch rig for casting and retrieving, what is known in freshwater bass circles as the Carolina rig. The 8-12 lb. test main line is threaded through a 3/4-1 oz. egg sinker and a red 8mm bead and tied to a #10 barrel swivel. A 18”-24” fluorocarbon leader of 6-8 lb. test ends with a #8 - #4 hook. They then hook on a 1” - 1.5” piece of Berkley’s Gulp Sandworm cut from a 6” worm. Casting and slowly retrieving this rig, my two pals caught more perch than the other half dozen perchers on the beach using reg- ular 1.5” surf perch grubs. One trip doesn’t prove anything, but Billy D says he usually outfishes the others on a regular basis using the sandworm. So ... does Berkley’s Gulp Sandworm in camo work? Yes, it does! But we a