Quick strike rig question

[Cooter]

Howdy,

I'm looking to make my own quick strike rigs for northerns with tip ups and am not sure how to make an adjustable one. I plan on using 27# multistrand and a pair of #6 trebles. I can handle the connections on the swivel end and rear hook but again am not sure how to rig the second, adjustable treble - shrink tubing?. Any suggestions/illustrations? Thanks,later.

[Jim Hudson]

Cooter

This is how I make my adjustable quicks for pike through the ice...

Cut your wire to your desired length, crimp on your barrel swivel to the one end....

Now put a crimping sleeve on from the un-crimped end, then a bead, then your treble, then another bead... Bring the non crimped end through the sleeve... and then crimp the front treble onto the end.

The rig will be adjustable through the sleeve and the beads will work as bumpers against the floating sleeve. Also, the beads work as an attractor. Has worked great for me over the years.

[fiskyknut]

Cooter, go out and find yourself some Surflon micro supreme, a 49 strand microwire made by American fishing wire. Great wire with a price to match though! With this stuff you can tie various knots instead of using crimping sleeves which if not crimped just perfect are prone to different failures, and good knots are stronger. Myself I don't use adjustable QS rigs as I feel you get better hooking percentage with a rigid 2nd hook tied in one spot on the rig, that sliding hook bit kinda defeats the purpose of the 2 hooks being a given distance apart in my book. You can tie a few different distance between hook variants to cover your different bait sizes.

Won't be too long and I'll be somewhere's on the LOTW plopping out the tipup sets for the early ice Pike bite.

fiskyknut

[RK]

Hiya -

I'm kinda with Fisky on this one. I have used adjustable QS rigs, and much prefer them with fixed hooks. One reason is with the adjustable ones they can get pretty kinked up pretty fast so you end up going through a lot of them. I make mine out of uncoated #27 sevenstrand, and wrap the connections with a forceps. If you do the wrap correctly the don't fail.

I usually just make up a bunch of qs rigs with different spacing for the hooks for different size dead baits.

An aside - last season I used Mustad Triple Grip trebles on all my QS rigs. Awesome hooks for quick strike rigs.

Cheers,

Rob Kimm

[Cooter]

Thanks much guys, I'm gonna do some experimenting as soon as this other disease called deer hunting ends.

Hey RK, I understand the wrap for the wire on the swivel, end hook, but what are you doing with the other hook to keep it in place? Later.

[RK]

Hiya -

Oops - forgot that part. I use heat-shrink tubing to keep the front hook in place. I use dead bait most of the time, and the dead bait just hangs head down. Pike don't care in the least whether or not the thing is horizontal.

Cheers,

Rob Kimm

[Cooter]

Thanks much, I got er now. Shouldn't you be out fishing today rather than jockeying the keyboard?

[RK]

Hiya -

Ahaha... Been fishing the last 4 days, deer hunting the 2 before that. Have to work sometime.

Cheers,

Rob Kimm

[Cooter]

One other question and a comment. First, do quick strike rigged minnows(shiners/suckers) sit and swim in a natural fashion when set under a tip up? Second, any reason not to use either Tyger or Toothycritter leader materials? Later.

[Cooter]

I see now that Fiskyknut already mentioned the tieable leader material...my bad, thanks bud.

[fiskyknut]

Quote:

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First, do quick strike rigged minnows(shiners/suckers) sit and swim in a natural fashion when set under a tip up?

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Cooter I've never been able to train any of my sucker minnows to sit so I don't know about that sittin trick!! J/K

As Rob mentioned Pike don't care if it's hangin horizontal or not. I know folks that go to great lengths to get their deadbaits to hang or sit just right. I'm with Rob and don't think they care at all. Does a dead fish always lay horizontal in the water when it's bobbing around? Probably not and I've never had a problem catching Pikes however their hanging. I do however run my deadbaits on tipup sets right on the bottom here on the LOTW 9 times out of 10.

Your live Suckers will swim in a fairly natural way on a QS rig, but then again whats natural, any minnow stuck on a hook or 2 will swim somewhat unnatural I'd think as they can't meander around ya know! Lighter wire and finer/smaller hooks I'd reckon could only help in the natural appearance aspect. When I'm deadstickin Walleyes alot of times I hook Shiners up thru the bunghole area and they sure get bit....And they for darn sure are'nt swimmin very natural hooked like that!!!

fiskyknut

[RK]

Hiya -

As I said, I'm totally with Fisky on this one. I know there are guys that get really hung up on having things hang level, but pike don't care... Especially with dead bait, it's all smell anyhow.

For live bait, on the fairly rare occasions when I bother with live minnows, I just rig them the same way. The minnows will struggle to stay upright, which is probably a good thing. They [PoorWordUsage] out after a while and you need to change bait now and then, but you should probably be doing that fairly often anyhow, even with dead bait.

With live minnows you sometimes have to add weight, but I rarely do with dead bait unless I'm in water deeper than 18 feet or so. One trick, which one of my pike writers at The Next Bite - Esox Angler turned me on to, is using a bass bullet sinker turned upside down (so the pointy end is toward your QS rig) rather than a rubber core or split shot. With the worm weight, if you get a pike that's a runner, if the weight hangs on weeds it'll just slide on the line so the pike won't feel anything and drop the bait...

Sort of interesting that Fisky prefers his baits closer to the bottom. I guess I do the same on LoTWs and I suspect it's got a lot to do with the darker water, but on clear lakes I often have baits 3-5 feet off the bottom and sometimes even higher. If I'm over a pocket in a weed bed I'll set the line 2' above where the weeds around me top out, which may put the bait 7 or 8 feet off the actual bottom. another time when I put baits up high is when I've got a line just off the edge of a break. Say the break is in 8 feet, and I'm a short distance away over 16 feet. I'll set the line at 8 - the depth of the break - even though I'm not right on it. I don't know if fish are cruising off the break at the same depth as the break, or if they're cruising the break and see the bait out in space, but either way - they grab it. Varies from day to day though. Some days they all cruise along the bottom, other days they're up off it. Just have to experiment...part of the fun.

Cheers,

Rob Kimm