Grateful Dead Baits, Giant Browns
By Matt Straw

Deadbaits target big browns. Rigged quick-strike fashion, trolled or fished from shore, dead smelt, alewives, ciscoes, or shad can tantalize the biggest browns available in any system during spring--reservoirs, rivers, lakes, Great Lakes, even millponds. Deadbait works best in cold water and continues to produce up to and beyond water temperatures of 60 degrees.

Songwriter Matt Wilder searches the subarctic to the subtropics pursuing giant lakers, fat stripers, mammoth brook trout, and big browns. With a fly-rod. He requires that disclaimer since becoming a pariah in the fly-fishing community. He's been known to use his fly-rod to present deadbait--something of an anathema to fly-fishing purists (go figure). Fish deadbait and the hate mail will come.

Now the world knows. "Hey," he explains defensively, "I love fly-fishing, but let's catch something. When fly-fishing is the way to go, I'm all over it. But the whole idea is to feel something alive trying to pull your arms off. As long as I can hook and release big browns unharmed, show me the numbers. Show me the hottest tactic."

Wilder trolls deadbaits in reservoirs, natural lakes, and in the Great Lakes, where I showed him some of the world's finest brown-trout water. "Essentially, I modified Pacific Coast cutbait trolling techniques with a quick strike rig tied to a ball-bearing swivel," he said. "By leaving the bait whole, and by carefully placing snelled treble hooks in the bait, I can impart a similar action to the West Coast rig with much less hassle." The required action is a circular motion, a whump, whump, whump with the deadbait slowing on the rise and accelerating on the fall. As the deadbait rolls, it flashes. At some point during every revolution, it sends out a pulse of reflected light in every direction, like a big spinner blade. Scales slip off and sparkle in its wake. A scent trail lingers behind. Upon close inspection, browns find the real thing. They tend to follow lures for long distances, but trigger much quicker on deadbaits.

Depending on the size of the bait, Wilder rigs two or three #6 Gamakatsu trebles 1 to 2 inches apart by snelling them on 8-pound-test fluorocarbon lines, and he ties the short leader (8 to 14 inches) to a ball-bearing swivel. "Placing the trebles along the spine, inserting one hook from each treble into the bait, creates a quick-strike rig," Wilder said. "I imbed the front treble in the skull of the deadbait on one side, then place the following hooks along the back of the fish on the opposite side, putting a slight bend in the bait. This causes the bait to spin. The bend in the bait determines the speed of the spin, which should be approximately 1 1/2 revolutions per second at whatever speed you're trolling. Browns hook themselves in the mouth on the strike."

The most prominent reason for using fly-equipment, is manually triggering a big brown while working the fly-line. Fly-lines are designed to be thrown, but also to be handled, grabbed, pulled, and twitched. Sometimes stripping the deadbait in by hand then dropping it back was the most effective trigger. The deadbait was only 60 to 89 feet behind our boat. Easily, this was half the distance required to be effective with lures. In fact, lures wouldn't work at all directly behind the boat in the ultraclear water we were fishing--not even 200 feet back. Apparently, deadbait triggers fish at closer range because natural cues overcome trepidation caused by the proximity of the boat.

We used 8-weight rods and lines. Sink-tip lines, such as the 350-grain Teeny Saltwater Flyline, carry the bait slightly deeper, while a floating Cortland 444 worked better on the beach side. We also trolled Rapalas 100 to 200 feet behind in-line Off Shore boards. The fly-rod setup with deadbait, flatlined right behind the boat, outfished our minnowbaits 2 to 1.

It was late April. Wilder and I encountered steady south winds and pockets of warmwater just north of every stream mouth. Most of the beaches read anywhere from 45 to 48 degrees. One spot read 52 degrees, and that's where we cornered about 28 of our 36 browns. The three best browns, ranging from 16 to 18 pounds, hit alewives that were gratefully dead at the moment of truth.