I have been watching your shows the past few weeks and really enjoy them. Your LOTW crappie episodes may have inspired us to take a B-Y Baits prostaff trip up there next year.

We were basically doing the same type of sight fishing in 2-3 FOW on Saturday on the Mississippi River. Used the flashers just to know when something was down there, then would peak down the hole and sight fish the rest of the way til you got them to commit. We even saw what you were talking about regarding them first grabbing the tail of the plastic before engulfing it all.

Being a plastics guy, one thing that was bugging me watching this episode that most people wouldn’t even think of because it gets edited out… Don’t you get sick of re-baiting w/ those spikes/waxies after every fish? They showed how you were hooking them w/ two dangling down and one little “nose-tickler” hanging off the back. Seems like a lot of wasted time.

Why not use plastics? If the plastics you tried didn’t work for these picky gills, i know where you can get some that do

Just wondering because it was bugging the crap out of me at home watching.

Edit: Please use email for correspondence.

Some days it’s tough, we drilled over 100 holes before we found fish yesterday. Im sore today, but it was worth it because we did finally find them. It doesn’t always work that way. Somedays you drill and drill and never find them, that’s fishing, but at least you can say you tried.

I guess that’s my only advice. Drill. Drill. and drill some more. That’s all you can do.

Think of it like open water fishing. Who in their right mind would go out on the water and continuously cast over and over in the same spot not catching any fish? if we saw someone doing this we would call them an idiot. This is essentially what people are doing when they go out ice fishing, drill 2 holes and sit there all day w/out moving. They are casting in the same spot, all day long.

I apologize trekr, didn’t mean to jab ya that bad. I actually refrained from saying anything the first time I came across it, but couldn’t help myself when i saw it again.

Great bunch of guys here, but when you ask a question like that they are going to get some jabs in at ya.

I mean come on, asking “what does a guy gotta do to get a bite” when you aren’t marking any fish is like asking a nun if she wants to join you for a rendezvous at a strip club.

A better question might be “since there are no fish in these 30 fish cribs we are fishing, where would be a better place to start”, then once you find some fish maybe we can help you catch them.

Have a good one trekr and good luck finding some fish.

Ok, i can’t help myself…

First off, you are sitting on structure (30 cribs) and you are asking if adding more structure (reel weeds) will make the fish bite?

Second, you weren’t marking any fish, but want to know what you can do to make the fish bite? I dunno about you, but i have never caught any fish where i wasn’t marking any fish…

Well here’s my advice. Go find the fish Drill holes until you mark something and once you do, drill more holes to find the best concentration of fish. Just because there are fish cribs in a spot doesn’t mean they hold fish. A lot of the time all the small fish are holed up tight in the structure and the bigger ones are nearby, but if that structure doesn’t have any food, or there’s a lack of oxygen the fish will be elsewhere.

I have no sympathy for you not catching any if you went out and sat in the same spot all day and didn’t mark any fish. Just seems like a waste of time to me

We catch perch on our B-Y Baits plastics all throughout the winter. They love the fluorescent orange color late in the year, but we’ve caught them all throughout the season on various styles of our plastics.

Last year i rarely fished a day that i didn’t do good w/ either a white or brown B-Y Baits waterbug.

This year it has been purple, pearl pink and sweet potato B-Y Baits MayFly or MudBug. There is something special about our new MayFly. Rarely when ice fishing for panfish do i need to use my pliers to remove my hook, because you can usually just poke it in the direction of their throat with a finger and jar it loose so you can just dump it out. This year there have been days when we found the right color/style that they would have that plastic swallowed down to their a** because they smacked it so hard. Never seen that before with plastics. Usually you have to time the bite just perfect to set your hook, otherwise they figure it out and spit it out before you set your hook.

Kevin22, we would love to have you as a customer next year, so please keep us in mind. I am willing to bet you don’t have any plastics in your arsenal quite like ours though I’m betting you’ll come around

We honestly don’t have many freebies to spare these days. Everything we got goes to filling online and bait shop orders to try and keep up. I have been trying to get some freebies together the past couple weeks to send to some very nice folks who helped us get to where we are today, but every time i would get some set aside they would get robbed to fill orders. Good problem to have i suppose, as long as it doesn’t start cutting into my ice time

mplspug, that is kind of how we got our start. The first mold we made had 4 cavities to make 4 different baits in one shot. We started out just melting down our powerbaits and trigger x plastics that were ripped or melted to the inside of our tackle boxes. From there it became a sickness. Constantly tweaking designs and playing with different scents and colors. Trying to find the perfect hardness of plastic so it would have good motion, but wouldn’t get ripped off your hook when the first bluegill smacked it. There is a lot of work that went into each and every bait and color we carry. It took a long time to get our process down so we can consistently make a quality product. We laugh now when we look back at some of our older plastics because they look terrible compared to what we have today. It’s also funny looking at our first molds that we got less than 10 plastics from each shot because now we get at least 10 times that from each one. We would work our butts off just to get a good selection of plastics for us for the weekend, let alone our friends who wanted them.

Raymo, my favorite color combo is a gold tungsten jig and a white or brown plastic. I usually start w/ white or brown and fine tune the color from there. The MayFly seems to be the hot bait this winter, but i have had good luck w/ the BloodWorm and WaterBug the past few years as well.

life1978, you should have seen it 2-3 years ago when we first developed these plastics and would go fish a community hole on the river. We made them for ourselves and no one but a few close friends and relatives used them. There were days where no one was catching anything and our drag would be screaming every couple minutes till the crowd moved right in on top of us. Then when they’d get to close, we’d move outside of the mob and start catching them out of all the holes people vacated. haha good times

Raymo, the other benefit to using plastics over traditional live baits is it’s faster and easier to change your presentation. Say you are using waxworms and the fish are still coming to check out your presentation, but just won’t hit it like they would 30 min ago. What do you usually do? Tie on a new jig to try a different color. We all know how difficult it is to tie on a new jig in cold weather w/ the 1-3 lb test line that is as thin as a hair. That’s what’s great about plastics. Generally i will use the same tungsten jig all weekend (usually a gold, white or perch pattern) and just change the plastic when i need to change the presentation a little bit. It’s so much easier and usually that’s all it takes is a little different color or style to get those finicky fish to bite.

We have used lots of other plastics in the past and have had success w/ Trigger X, J and S, Little Atom, Etc. These are all great companies that make quality products. The reason we decided to make our own was because of those really tough fishing days, where most people shy away from plastics and go to a wax worms/spikes/etc. This is where ours shine because of the realistic detail and soft plastic construction that makes them come to life in the water. Just look at this comparison picture. We have researched commonly found bugs and larvae and designed our baits to match. To me there is no comparison.

Do other plastics work? Definitely, Yes

But ours work when theirs don’t and that’s the difference

Maybe we could even convince Andy to give them a try?!?!?

Good luck out there!

Look down a few pages and there are a few threads that have been started on this already.

I haven’t bought any wax worms in over a year because we use our own homemade B-Y Baits plastics. I admit my opinion is a little bias (a friend and I designed and manufacture them in his basement and just started the company last october), but i have used these plastics for the past 3 ice seasons and haven’t needed to use anything else. We catch bluegills, bass, crappies, perch, walleye and white bass all on our miro plastics. Here are a few pics of some presentations. PM me for more details or check out our website. We have a link for tips and techniques right on the homepage. Also, if you check out our facebook page, i try and put pics of our presentations on there as well.

Darrin

Here’s a couple B-Y Baits presentations that have been working for me this year…

These were all caught today using B-Y BAITS micro plastics.

They placed another order and I am hoping to be able to drop that off this weekend. When I drop an order off or we pick up a new bait shop I will usually post on our facebook page, so if you haven’t done so yet, like us on there.