Great Family fishing Location - Whitney

[Cowboypirate]

Ok. So I am behind, this was a couple weekends ago. Family favorite location that we can get Kaleb and his wheelchair close to the water. Great fishing with all the traditional steel offerings in silver and gold, garlic powerbait, wet flies - you know the drill, no secrets to offer on this one, just good fun. We usually try to hit Whitney in early June before the ATV crowds takes over, but this years weather pushed us a lot later into the month.

We had the hottest action on the SW section and anywhere close to spring inlets, but frankly we caught fish about anywhere we pulled in to try.

I know a serious couple posts have been had about the use of circle hooks for cats. Cookie and I have been trying to find better ways to lip hook trout with bait - as her MS progresses, and with Buckwheat, we find ourselves using bait more and more - so finding ways to reduce deep hook sets is important to us.

Experimented on this trip with a small circle style with power bait. That and setting earlier, really improved our lip hook percentage. I was very pleased with this first test. We did miss some with this system, but overall hookup rate was pretty exciting.

Anyone else figured out how to lip hook your trout when bank tangling?

Here is the video

https://youtu.be/2sK6hzqn5kI
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[Fishhound]

1. Circle hooks are a good choice for lip hooking. Do let the fish set the hook itself.

2. You can also try Drop shotting - that also has a great percentage of lip hooks. Be attentive and set early.

3. Fligs sweetened with bait or using plastics can as well - set the hook early on these too.

Lastly, a personal favorite in many waters, (it may not be applicable to your situation though) is using flies on a fly rod or behind a bubble on a spinning rod. Never had a fly taken that I had to dig out of a fish.

There are several variations of these techniques and a few others as well. I am sure some of the other folks here will chime in on those.
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[catchinon]

So what size circles did you use? Any size work better than others?
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[Cowboypirate]

We used Matzuo size 6 on a 18" leader. Photo attached. Tried a size 8 but had some issues holding bait on. I really like how it set. Now it was hard to adjust the strike to to a circle hook. Years of old school swinging hard back for the set was a hard habit to break. But that circle, as we discussed in the cat circle hook forum, requires a gentle hand.

A lot of work to perfect this, but I like how our first attempt went.

We did have some issues with the line breaking at the shank where the Snell ended, but cookie blamed that on me and my needle nose causing a crimp on the line during previous releases. She is likely right.
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[Cowboypirate]

The fly and bubble is my favorite mountain rig, but it's getting harder for cookie to cast for any length of time. But we still use it a lot. Going to try the jig and flig, that should work good
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[smittyts]

Forgive my ignorance, but what is a flig? Thank you.
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[Fishhound]

FLIG = Floating Jig



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