Do you all know this guy?

[fishinwrench]

17 minutes ago, Chief Grey Bear said:

He said he didn't think of it until the 90's. I learned it from my dad back in the 70's. He learned it back in the 50's. I taught to my son just after the turn of the century. 

 

I first was shown it by a guy named Conrad Charles up in Mexico, and of course he took credit for coming up with it not by specifically stating that he did, but by the way he whispered about it.  I tried it on a variety of baits but it just seemed to kill the action and honestly I didn't stick with it long enough to learn to like it.  There has yet to be a bait, or a modification, that fails to catch fish.  

[Terrierman]

Whenever I'm at a music show and they play one I like I tell everybody I'm with I wrote that song.

[Gavin]

I did enjoy the video. First time I heard about the skirt was from Al Agnew. Thanks for posting a link to the vid.

[Al Agnew]

Yep, I was doing it by the early 70s, and I surely didn't invent it, I was shown it by a guy that was about 30 years older than me, and he'd been doing it for a long time.  I didn't know of anybody outside our little group that was doing it on Big or Meramec, but I soon found out that people were doing it on the Big Piney back then.  I've experimented with the belly hook skirt on all kinds of lures, and probably know about as much about how and why it works as anybody.  

The old vinyl skirts were always what we used back then, and for the lures we were using them on, they WERE the best, and still are.  The reason for that is two-fold.  One, the collar of the vinyl skirts is just the right amount of bulky.  The old rubber skirts, though some in other parts of the Ozarks much preferred them, were a little too bulky in the collar to give the right action to the lures we used.  With all the skirts you can get these days, they are still not as good, because the living rubber or silicone skirts with the little rubber rings for collars aren't quite bulky enough, and the ready made skirts that you can buy for spinnerbaits and such are a little too bulky in the collar.  They are all usable with a little tinkering.  But the second reason that the vinyl skirts were the best was that they had the right amount of stiffness.  The old rubber ones and the living rubber or silicone ones these days are a little too limp.  The reason this is a problem is that the strands get all tangled up much more quickly around the hook points and just tie themselves in knots.  Like this guy, I still have a supply of vinyl skirts, and have found a place or two to get new ones as well.  I still use them more than the other materials, but the problem with them is that they aren't available in all the cool colors that the new skirts have.

Jerry gave you one reason why the skirt on the belly hook works--hiding the hooks--but it's not the only reason, and probably in my opinion not the biggest reason.  I learned this a long time ago from a video fishing lure commercial on one of the early fishing shows.  The advertisement for a particular crankbait at the time showed underwater footage of the bait running through the water, and of several big bass hitting it.  What was eye-opening was that the bass didn't all just engulf the whole lure, even though their mouths were big enough to do so.  Instead, some of them were coming up to the lure and with some precision biting ONLY the swinging belly hook, which was unadorned on those lures.  Hmm, if a swinging hook was an attraction, a swinging hook with a skirt on it should be much MORE of an attraction.  This has been borne out in all my experience, in that nearly ALL the fish I catch on these lures are hooked only on the skirted belly hook.  The rear hook is almost unnecessary, and in fact I sometimes remove it.

It's not a magic trick.  As was mentioned above, it is perfect for the old Midge-oreno AND the old Baby Lucky 13.  In the old days the guys in our group used it on the Midge, but the guys I knew elsewhere in the Ozarks did the belly hook skirt thing with the Baby Lucky 13.  The principle was the same with those two lures.  They were originally designed as slow-retrieve, shallow-running crankbaits and not topwaters the way many fished them.  Without a skirt, they had a very wide, erratic wobble, almost like they were swimming in big zig zags.  But put the skirt on the belly hook and it tamed that erratic, super-wide wobble into what was still a fairly wide wobble, but one that was much more uniform.  The skirt acted as a balance point.  I went for many years only using a skirt on the Midge, and began making my own Midge type lures when it  became difficult to impossible to find the commercial version.  But my brother actually was the first I knew to try it on a different lure...he put one on a 1-Minus, and it was very effective.  Soon everybody in the area was using a skirt on the 1-Minus.  

Well, I got to figuring that if it worked on shallow runners like my Midges and the 1-Minus, it should be really effective on deeper runners.  But experimentation showed it killed the action of many deep divers.  With the Midge (and the Baby Lucky 13), the skirt actually waved or wobbled as much or more than the body of the lure...the lure was making the skirt wave.  But with most lipped lures, including the 1-Minus, the lure wobbled more than the skirt.  The skirt just kinda vibrated as the lure wobbled up there above it.  I didn't like that look, I wanted the skirt to at least wave as much as the lure wobbled.  So I began to experiment.  I bought a lot of crankbaits, and even tried to make some, that dived deep but would wave that skirt widely.  I finally found that, like Jerry, it made a difference if the skirt collar was up close to the eye of the hook, instead of down by the bends like we always put it on the shallow running baits without lips.  That's the only innovation of his that I've not seen, that v-shaped piece of wire to hold the skirt collar up close the eye of the hook.  I solved that problem a couple of different ways which I won't go into now.  

But mainly, the skirt only works on lipped crankbaits the way I want it to if it's fairly sparse, and it only works really well on a couple of them that I've found.  I've done some other modifications to other crankbaits to make the skirt work better, including removing the rear hook and changing the placement of the belly hook.

It's not magic, like I said before, EXCEPT on those old shallow runners.  I still fish my homemade version of the Midge religiously--if the water temps are in the mid-50s or higher and the water clarity is less than 5 feet visibility, I guarantee you I'll be throwing one until the bass tell me they don't want it.  And I wouldn't dream of throwing it without the skirt.  It's produced as many big smallmouth over the years as any lure I use.  But on deep divers, I use several without skirts as much as I use the one or two that work well with skirts.

[Harps]

[Chief Grey Bear]

4 hours ago, Harps said:

Everybody outside the Meramec was always doing it wrong. 

[Flysmallie]

14 hours ago, MOPanfisher said:

Sort of lie putting a big ole pork rind on a Johnson Silver Minnow, it worked but the JSM action was completely lost.

 

You have to use a white ripple rind strip. That was golden on the farm ponds in southern Oklahoma. 

[tjm]

Does anyone make pork baits nowadays?

[MOPanfisher]

7 minutes ago, Flysmallie said:

 

You have to use a white ripple rind strip. That was golden on the farm ponds in southern Oklahoma. 

They were killers on farm ponds around home as well.  I remember walking through sweaty chigger infested woods to get to some of them when I was a kid.  Figuring nobody ever fished them, some were good, some not so much.

[slothman]

12 hours ago, tjm said:

Does anyone make pork baits nowadays?

I don’t know, but I’d sure like to see Uncle Josh’s make a return. I’m almost out and only try to bring out the ones I have left on special occasions (for the most part).