What’s better than having one fly?

Now you might be thinking: Uncle Kalyn, why did you spend all that time tying and rigging something that you can’t even catch fish with?

“BECAUSE I CAN!”

The true reason for making this rig is partially due to my addiction to watching other people catch fish. The other reason is that I know that it works, and it may surprise you to learn how many species this little devil will trick into a frenzy. Most people that have fished or have watched National Geographic have seen a predator fish and/or all his buddies school up a cloud of smaller bait fish and cause unholy tornadic chaos. Needless to say, being a big eats fly junkie, this is my kind of chaos. The techniques that have been used to imitate tight groups of nervous baitfish go back to premodern times I would suspect. My first experience with a spinner bait went something like, “Grandpa, why do the bass like to chase down all this spinning metal so much? Well Kalyn, to the bass it looks like several smaller fish are swimming together.”

I would expect that your mind goes at once to some favorite multi fish imitator you’ve used in the past. Just a double streamer rig guy? That counts.

My first bona fide experience with teasers came when we used to fish offshore in Florida when I was a kid. We went out with spreads and teasers, pulled them behind a sport fisher, and on the less boring days got to watch sails and kings rip through the crowd of fake fish to grab ahold of something with a hook in it. Trolling can be slow, boring, epic, fast, and absolutely adrenaline pumping, but its not really for me. The other side of using teaser rigs in the salt I learned at the end of a pier. I earned the status of pier rat in a previous life, and one of my favorite things to do was to throw the McDonald rig. The McDonald rig starts with an adjustable clear float. This type of float can have its weight adjusted by adding water and keeping the water in the clear egg shape with a stopper peg that also allows the line to run through the float. So, you run the main line through the float and tie it off to a swivel. You then tie your leader to the other end of the swivel, and you slide on a 3-inch piece of a McDonald’s straw with one end cut to a point. After you pass the line through the straw you tie it off to a dressed treble hook. I am aware that this doesn’t sound like much, but the action it gets is insane. You tie the rig off to the longest heaviest rod you have, cast the rig to the moon from the end of the pier and reel it in as fast as possible. The rig ends up looking like several baitfish bubbling and jumping around moving quickly near the surface. Where I used to fish there was no telling what might come up and grab the straw, but we focused on the Macks. (Decent table fare and one of the best shark baits in the game) This technique became so popular that I have seen styles that included sprinkler heads, flukes, metal balls, any kind and style of straw you have ever seen, two dressed treble hooks, a Rapala jerk bait on the end, and every other iteration a nerd fisherman would come up with for an edge. I’m fairly sure someone ended up cornering the market by making fancy ones you could buy at the bait shop. The biggest morning rush I remember was at the Pompano Pier. I would guess somewhere around 200 keeper Spanish Mackerel were caught using that rig in just a couple of hours. MAYHEM!

Over on the freshwater side of things.

I can hear the largest group of fisher people in the US grumbling about it already. The other cast-able teaser rig that I’m sure someone out there knows, and loves is the Alabama rig. With many names and who knows how many different purchasable options available online the Umbrella rig is no joke. It ended up being banned in many competitions. I wasn’t big into the umbrella rigs for largemouth bass (double fluke kind of guy), but I did throw them on the beach for snook and jacks quite a bit. Unfortunately, it worked too well. I would go down to only two hooks and would catch doubles a lot, which sounds great, but with bigger fish that meant a lot of broken gear and money to keep playing a silly game. That was about the time that I started to make one hook fly versions. Catching more than one fish at a time was kind of silly so I would just cut the hooks off two or three flies and leave the hook on the last fly on the rig. I did find that making the back fly a predator chasing the hookless flies worked well to fire some fish up. It seemed like the fish were saying, “If someone is eating something, then its going to be me!”

I had two good reasons to experiment with teasers at that time. Like I said, on the beach being able to present a good bait ball is killer. Fish come from everywhere to check it out. Equally if not a more important use of the rig for me was in the canals. The biodiversity and population density in some of the canals is just mind blowing. There aren’t many things more fun than pulling a teaser rig around and just seeing what color the next fish to chase is going to be. Everything from peacocks and snakeheads to large mouth and snook are on patrol in those waters. I liked to run a 3 pack of fingerling mullet. The flies would be the canal colors, 3 inches long, usually EP, and weightless. The hook not being cut off of the back fly dropped it down just enough to get picked off by the bait buster the most often. When the mullet weren’t getting any love, I would switch to a 4 or 5 pack of glass minnows, 3 or 4 hookless and a drop back fly with a hook. Might as well call this the aquarium rig.

It’s hard to say for sure that 5 flies attract more fish than 2 flies or even 1 for that matter. I will say that I have had some wild experiences throwing multi fly rigs. Speckled trout, brown trout, blue gill, white bass, striped bass, northern pike, peacock, snook, smallmouth, largemouth, snakehead, yellow perch, rainbow trout, lady fish, blue runners, and so on are on the list that I can confirm like the bait ball, and I’m not done throwing a balled up mess of mono, steel, and feathers yet.

I think my current model will get some use with crappie and smallmouth this spring, then lady fish, specks, and snook early summer. Now I just need a buddy to throw one of the matching flies I’ve made at the teaser when I scream, ON ME ON ME ON ME!!!

A thought for Paul:

What if you had a teaser rig that had 6 or 7 hookless snakehead fry flies? Say you throw it near a fry ball that you can see. Do you think that the fry guarders would come to guard your teaser?