FRESHWATER
6 Feb 2- 16, 2018 VOL. 37 • ISS. 04
Hoochie Tips …
^Both natural baitfish colored hoochies and bright super visible hoochies should be represented in your tackle box. With the exception of Wiggle Hoochies, hoochies have no built in action, so you’ ll have to team them with a dodger. For trout and kings put the hoochie 2 to 3 dodger lengths behind the blade. When kokanee are the target you might want to go as short as one dodger length.
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Hoochies with their tentacles and hollow body are perfect for holding scent and adding scent to hoochies is a critical part of maximizing success. These pansize Kokanee fell in love with a pink Wiggle Hoochie charged with Pro- Cure Bait Sauce teamed with a Mack’ s Lure Double D Dodger.
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Hoochies are a great tool for imitating the baitfish that big reservoir trout and salmon feed on. Gary Miralles of Mack’ s Lure / Shasta Tackle tempted this big trout with a pink Shasta Tackle Wiggle Hoochie teamed with a 6 inch UV pink Sling Blade.
^Hoochies are fun to play with. Here, Cal Kellogg has teamed a hammered Mack’ s Lure Wedding Ring with a champagne colored hoochie during a late morning kokanee trolling session.
Hoochies: Low Cost, Highly Versatile Tools For Trout & Landlocked Salmon Trollers!
Have you ever noticed that the simplest lures and presentations are often the best? Lures that are painstakingly created to exactly match the forage gamefish feed on are often, indeed almost always upstaged by simple impressionistic offerings.
In terms of simplistic lures there are few that are simpler than the hoochie. For folks that aren’ t familiar with them, hoochie are nothing more than hollow plastic“ squid”, basically a plastic skirt that can be slipped on a leader, rear hook of a lure or even on a jig head.
FISH SNIFFER HOW – TO by Cal Kellogg
Hoochies in the 4 to 6-inch range first stormed onto the West Coast fishing scene as lures used for ocean salmon trolling. Commercial salmon anglers in particular embraced hoochies because they found them nearly as effective as anchovies and herring, but much simpler and faster to rig than baitfish.
These days hoochies remain an important tool for ocean salmon anglers, but relatively recently anglers that target trout, kings, kokanee and coho salmon residing in lakes, discovered how deadly small hoochies in the 1.5 to 2-inch size range can be.
If you are a trout or landlocked salmon angler that has yet to try trolling with hoochies, it’ s time for you to get started. Not only will hoochies help you catch more fish, but they also help you save money since they are significantly cheaper than a lot of other offerings.
I would say that one of the things that really appeals to me about hoochies beyond the fact that they catch fish and don’ t cost an arm and a leg is the versatility they offer. There are a bunch of different ways to rig them depending on whether you are fishing
presents
them alone or teaming them with another lure or natural bait. Fished alone they closely match the shape and action of a small baitfish.
Teamed with baits and lures they add a dimension that few fish have seen and when you show fish something they haven’ t seen your chances of getting hit rise dramatically. Let’ s take a look at some of these rigging options and how you can use hoochies to the best advantage.
For starters, there are three kinds of hoochies you’ ll find on the market. These include loose unrigged hoochies, rigged hoochies and wiggle hoochies.
Wiggle hoochies come prerigged with a long leader and a pair of hooks and are fitted with a special clear plastic lip that make them wiggle pretty much the way a crankbait does.
Rigged hoochies come out of the package rigged with a fairly long leader and a pair of hooks. Some companies offer plain pre-rigged hoochies, while other companies offer hoochies that are downright fancy with added tinsel and flashabou.
As you probably are guessing I use all three types, but most often develop my own rigs using loose unrigged hoochies. For basic trout, king or kokanee fishing I rig a hoochie like this. I take a piece of 12-pound fluorocarbon leader material that is about 20 inches long and snell a pair of No. 6 or 8 octopus hooks on the end of it, such that they are from 1 to 1.25 inches apart and facing in different directions. Next, I slide on a pair of 1 / 8-inch glow in the dark beads. With the beads in place I slide a hoochie on the leader with the skirted end facing toward the hooks. I slide the hoochie down to the beads and
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