Just Angling for Feb. 3, 2005

By Donald Millus

Craftsman Dreams of Trout, Bluefish, Flounder

It was 6:30 of last Saturday morning, with warnings of icy weather already coming over the radio, when the telephone rang. It had to be our daughter, Sara, in Columbia, usually an early riser.

“Dad, I need some advice about driving on ice.”

“Don’t”

I went on to explain that in South Carolina, ice storm warnings will scare off most conference goers. Secondly, no one really knows how to drive on ice with the exception of teenagers who want to do doughnuts with their family cars. “Wait until the roads thaw this afternoon,” I suggested. It didn’t take much to convince her.

With nasty weather expected on the coast later in the day, I decided not to do any clamming. My agenda would be to re-paint and replace the rusted hooks on a score of MirrOlures that had been temporarily retired over the years. To be honest, I had been planning to do this for at least eight years. I even had handy a can of day-glow orange paint, plus a tiny screwdriver, and a pair of fine pliers from Sea Striker.

(Reading the fine print on the pliers, I noted that they had been made in Pakistan, a most undemocratic country, but since I had recently assembled a number of kitchen and bathroom free-standing cabinets made in the notoriously un-free and un-democratic Chinese People’s Republic, I put my political qualms on hold. Progress toward freedom could wait one more day, especially in such nasty weather.)

MirrOlures, as serious salt water trout fishermen know, are some of the best plugs ever designed, and they are getting better. The four-inch heavy plastic bodies are fish-shaped, with a tail hook and one or two treble hooks hanging from the underside. There are different weights, too, but the best innovation is a plastic “lip,” such as lures like the “Rebel,” more popular with fresh-water anglers, have always utilized. A few years back the L and S Lure Company added lips and rattles to its lure variations with excellent results.

Another improvement was the introduction of red treble hooks, an innovation originally from Japan, inventor of the circle hook. As I wrote in this column late last fall, I encountered some anglers from New Jersey who were tearing up the trout with 52M11 MirrOlures with red heads and white bodies, and 750’s (“Christmas Tree” colors) in the same weight. They had not heard about the lipped and rattled models, but they will. (In the interest of disclosure, I caught my biggest fall trout, to 22 inches, on lipped and rattling L52MR 18’s, white belly, green top.)

A thin metal plate, stainless steel I assume since these were tarnished but not rusted like the old hooks, and tiny screws hold the belly hooks in place. To remove these a jeweler’s screwdriver, steady hand, and good light are needed. I spent some four hours removing old rusty hooks and replacing them with shiny new ones. I cut myself only once, and that was with a new hook. The pliers came in handy with both tail and body hooks.

I never used the spray paint, for a simple washing in dishwashing detergent got the lures looking like new, except for the tooth marks on the rear portions of some of them, I thought of the fangs of winter trout, the jaws of bluefish, and the teeth of flounder taking their last bite over the years in Murrells Inlet or at the Little River jetties.

I left the belly hooks off a few of the older lures destined to be used for bluefish. (Getting two or three treble hooks out of the jaws of a three-pound bluefish is definitely not fun, which is why I don’t compound the problem by dipping a MirrOlure-hooked blue into a landing net.)

I finished just as I was losing daylight through my office workshop windows, but with enough time to take the motor off my skiff and locate an annoying leak near the drain plug. William Barker will be welding that for me this week, or so he will soon find out. Meanwhile I am gazing at a score of shining plugs carefully arranged around the edges of a cardboard box once filled with spools of Ande line, which brings me to my next inter-season project, refilling spools on my reels.