I'm 'in the pink' with new wooden lures

 I'm looking forward to trying new wooden lures made by my neighbour, Dwayne Kotala. I'm lucky to get prototypes of what might become production models in the future.

Dwayne hand-carves these from native tree species like pine. Many are modeled on historic lures from 100 years ago. Some come right from Dwayne's imagination. 

I'm going to use these to fish for northern pike, my favourite species. I cast for these fish, mostly, and an advantage of wooden lures is they are heavier than plastic models; so, I can use my baitcasting rig which is ideal for handling big pike. The drag system on a baitcaster is so smooth compared to a spinning reel.

I surprised Dwayne, I think, years ago by telling him that pike like pink. As you can see he has painted many of these models just for me.

I replace the trebles on Dwayne's lures with single salmon or siwash hooks. The reason is the fish tend to take the entire bait into their mouths and the trebles are too difficult to extract quickly. 

I left the trebles on one of the lures in the photo to show how much larger a single hook needs to be to work effectively. 

Salmon lures almost always have single hooks. The reason, I'm told, is that when a fish is caught with a single hook it nearly always stays on.

If you are considering changing hooks as I have done you need to know that ordinary single hooks will not do the trick. You can't use a baitholder hook, for instance. It needs to be a salmon hook. These have long shanks, both on the standing part and the barb part. 

Siwash hooks are just salmon hooks with an open eye that you can close with pliers. You can only do this once. If you try to re-open it, it will likely break. 

Make sure your hooks on plugs face forward. That way you will pull them into the fish's mouth when you set the hook.