Laker rigging question

[Gas Man]

All,

I have a couple of quick questions. First is that since I have added stinger hooks to my kit, I have had many more hookups. That said, sometimes when I have fish move in from the bottom, they seem to tap my jig and miss. I am thinking of adding a 4 link chain of split rings to the bottom of a few rap like jigs, and upsizing hooks. The point is to add a dangling hook, a little further down. Hopefully this will do what the stinger has been doing for me on my tube jigs. There is a walleye rig like this, but the chain that is used looks too light and it has a single barbed hook.

The second thing that I am questioning is that when I cut fish for the table, the crops are always full of case caddis flies in their pupil stage. They look like sticks, but when you tear their case apart, you find a pale green worm living in them. I am sure that the fish are dredging these up and off of the bottom. Anyone have any thought as to how to mimic this, I am a fly tier, looking for a possible presentation for the dead stick.

Gas Man

[Steve Foss]

Gas Man, can't help you on the caddis mimic, but lakers do love to suck things off the bottom like vacuum cleaners. Smelt, cisco, other dead minnows.

The taps that seem to miss probably are shoulderings and tail slaps. Lakers sometimes bump a bait with their shoulder or give it a rap with the tail. If you are fishing from a dark house and tempt them up to within sight of your fishing hole and sight fish them, you can see them swim wide out of the cone and then back in, passing the bait, sometimes passing it completely, other times bumping it with shoulder or tail slaps. Pretty cool to watch.