do you wait til the rod buries or hit it when you see the take?

personally i want the guys in front to wait til it buries but that seems to be alot to ask for some reason.

i've been missing alot of fish, and yes, my hooks are sharp.

I mean to wait until the rod just buries into the water, but it seems that myself and friends in my boat have very difficult time wait that long for some reason...

I would like to think I can wait for the fish to turn on it's own thus setting the hook and burying the rod but that's not alway possible. It seems that the most common time of losing fish is when they grab it and just keep on swimming towards the boat! Nothing else to do but try and get a good hook set on your own. Iffy when that happens! I'm still playing around with different type hook set ups. Right when I think I've got it figured out they start coming unbuckled again .

Burried.............all the way. I'll even help by rowing upstream.

Wait for it! Actually I do most of my Kwikfish fishing backtrolling with a kicker. As soon as the rod jumps I hammer the throttle and keep it on until the rod is in hand and bent double, peeling line. This is especially important on downriggers.

yep, a few slightly harder pulls back on the oars is what i've been doing....

...what i really want to know how in the heck the damn things don't stick with six hooks of death flasling away in the water. I can barely get them out of the package without a trip to the er.....

Originally posted by: h2o
CLASSIC analogy

Short of producing a tanned goat scrotum full of bones and feathers to throw out on the table in a "mystical analysis," I've got no solid answers. Sometimes I wonder if they hit high on the head of the plug with the mainline in their mouth, take the rod down hard and then release and swim away.

I don't have any tanned goat scrota handy, but I do have some koala bear toe jam, and it's telling me this: Think about how a kwikfish wiggles. At the outside of each wiggle, it is flinging those six points of death all the way to one side. Now, if a fish comes from the opposite side a bit, those hooks have been flung away from him, and when he clamps on the plug, the hooks are near his nose, rather than the corner of the jaw.

So I think it's pretty easy to get why we lose a lot of fish on these. Their very nature makes them poorer hooking devices than, say, a diver and bait. Too bad they get so many strikes.

do you think that bead chain setup you showed us a few years back increases the landed fish percentage over the stock hook arrangement?

What rod are ya usin' steelhead420? Very fast action rods don't have enough "give" and the fish won't end up turning completely. Just my .02

I have been around the block with this issue several times, but here are my observations:

1) I believe the Kwikfish is hands down the all-time best river salmon fishing lure ever invented. It draws the most vicious strikes an angler is ever likely to witness from four of the five Pacific salmon species. If there is a biter in the bunch, it'll hit a Kwik.

2) Fishing them with stock double trebles SUCKS!
A) Way too many daggers to damage a fish when used in any sort of selective fishery, or when having to sort thru a lot of undesirables to get the fresh fish you want.
B) Although the chances of hooking up are increased, a much higher percentage of hooked fish come off. Why?
a. Any individual tine lacks enough gap to hold a substantial piece of flesh/bone.
b. The fish can use the remaining tines to leverage out the one that stuck the fish.
c. Hook enough fish and eventually you will lose a few when they're being netted.... the points not buried in the fish's mouth have a nasty way of finding the mesh at the critical moment. If the plug gets hung up before the head hits the bottom of the bag, your fish is toast.

3) Fishing them with singles also sucks, but not as bad as trebles. The number of missed strikes on singles is very frustrating, but once hooked a single large siwash is exceedingly unlikely to come unbuttoned, even more so with the new 510 singles. With literally hundreds of strikes under my belt, the running average of landed fish is barely over 50%, regardless of species. That's just the cold harsh reality of fishing Kwiks.

4) Still trying to figure out the best way to rig one solitary single point hook. The only way I have not really tried is with a bead chain off the belly screw-eye. Anybody do it that way routinely? What are your hooking stats.

Been there, tried that fNp up north. Don't have exact numbers, but I was not impressed. For a selective fishery, I still run 4/0 off a swivel placed in the rear eye. Honestly, the 4/0 seems to do way better than most of the bigger hooks for kings / silvers of normal size.

I wait, and wait, and wait some more.

It all seems to run in streaks. Today, we had 17 takes to land four fish ... good thing Corey buzed my head a couple of nights ago because I was trying to rip my hair out, but fortunately it was too short to hold onto. Tomorrow, we get 90% of them.

Life with kwikies .. ya love 'em, you hate 'em

I thought I just answered this question,I went to 7/0 gami Octopus hooks connected to just the ring with one hook pointed one way and the other hook pointed the other and I know for a fact that my hook up to landing ratio has increased and thats the way it is!!!PEACE

kid rock-

i'm using lamiglas magnum hot shot rods, i forget the number.

Wait for that rod to burry itself 4 times before you pick it up. It is hard to do after fishing for Steelies for so long.

I always grab the rod as soon as it buries. I run two 3/0 siwash hooks on swivels on my quickies.

If I can get the rod out of the holder and the fish is still there I land probably 90+% of the fish. That being said only about 60-70% are still there by the time I get the rod.

For some reason hook-ups tend to be real streaky. I'll have five drive by's in row and then nail the next 7or 8. I'm still constantly amazed a fish can almost pull the rod out of the boat and not stay hooked.

They need to move the hooks from the bottom and back of the Kwikie and put them on the sides. I think the fish hit the side of the Kwikie.

I was thinking one single hook attached on top of the plug (it's back) right at the tail, hook point up. The hookups would be solid, but a fixed hook would probably slow down the side to side wobble of the plug. Also would be easier for the fish to leverage out the hook during the fight.

Where did you find that little guy?

Mike

Let's just say I didn't have to go all the way to Alaska for this one.

Seriously, I found him in the back of the HMS eyeFISH

Normally, my hit to hookup ratio is pretty good, but this past weekend baffled me. I had 14 takedowns and only 2 landed. The worst ever by far. I'm thinking that it was the 8/0 hooks that switched too. I should have stuck with 5/0. Oh well, chalk it up to a learning experience.

BB

I had 8 take downs that didn't stick this past saturday,I was runnin a 4/0 off the belly and a 5/0 off the butt end.Saturday we went 7 for 12 with eight other take downs on plugs.Sunday the same plug on a different river went 8 for 9.Explain this???.I'm convinced it's all in how the fish takes it,meaning from the left or right side to side north and south.If it were legal in some area's I'd run a 2/0 owner treble off the back on a size 3 or 5 barrell and a 4/0 single siwash off the belly on barrel also.I think this would help.Good luck,
STRIKE ZONE

WOW talk about overkill. Have you looked at the difference in wire caliber between a 5/0 and 8/0. Unless you are using a broomstick for a rod and a virtually locked up drag, there's NO way you could ever drive that much metal into a fish's jaw, assuming of course that it was barbless. With a barb, it would be even worse. 5/0 is plenty.

I learned the same lesson tossing spinners for coho with 8# test and a light action spinning rod. I was using Vibrax #5 outfitted with 5/0 siwash from an Alaska king trip. Needless to say, I lost EVERY fish I hooked over the next week because I didn't have the backbone in my outfit to drive that much metal into flesh. Switching over to a 1/0 or 2/0 was an infinitely better choice. Oh well!

Overkill is right. The hooks were barbless, but didn't make a difference. They just didn't drive home. Every takedown on the 8/0's resulted in two pulls of line and fish off. We had some of the kwikies rigged 5/0 octopus and some siwash. Those were the only ones to land fish, but they too had their fair share of losses. Thank goodness we had our eggs with us (backbouncing with 5/0 octopus hooks) or we would have had a fruitless trip.

BB