squid tentacles

[popriveter]

I've been out jigging panfish 2 times and fished maybe a combined 2.5 hours this year, so I have very limited data to go on but here's my discovery...

Due to the short windows of time I've had to work with, I haven't spent much prep time and haven't bought live bait yet. I had a jar gulp maggots. It occurred to me that the frozen calamari in my freezer might work as bait. the squid tentacles are perfect size to bait a jig.

After reviewing the regs book, I concluded it would not be illegal and decided to try.

A-Am I wrong on this?

B-So far squid tentacles have produced 9 perch and 3 crappies and lost one large fish (bass? cat?). Gulp maggots have produced 0 fish, 0 bites. Chubby darter has produced 1 bite.

[goblueM]

wow, interesting idea... i don't see how it'd be illegal, or why a CO would bust you for it.

i'm a fan of the gulp spikes, rather than the maggots, especially when fish are active

[Hoffer]

cant see why that would be an issue either!

I cant imagine though that "calamari" would be cheap to get? But maybe you can get a LOT of bait off one tentacle? especially if your just pan fishing.

Good idea.

[popriveter]

I bought the squid for $3 at an asian market. There are about 20 small squid in the pack. Multiply that by 10 arms, and you've got some cheap bait.

Strange thing so far is that I usually 3 sunfish for every 1 perch, crappie or bass out of this lake, and so far this year, I haven't caught a single sunfish. I don't know if this is just a fluke or a time-of-day thing, or if sunfish aren't as likely to bite a piece of squid.

[Will]

Squid should be ok until the DNR decides to allow only " specially processed " calimari

[bgreen82]

if you continue to use it, check back in and let us know. i like the initiative though.

[Adam Wolf]

Good topic,

I've been in the asian market before too and have seen all kinds of fish and shrimp, frozen, pickled, freezedried etc and have thought of trying them as bait. The only thing keeping me back was not knowing if I would be introducing some exotic disease or something, especially with the ones that are raw or frozen. I too looked through the regs and didn't see anything about it but decided not to risk it knowing diseases like VHS likely came into the great lakes from ocean coming ships.