Dad’s Secret Weapon
A Deep, Dark Secret Now Revealed
Growing up in a trout-fishing family, I misspent a lot of my youth trying to catch more fish than my father. On weekends, vacations and holidays we’d be up in the mountains, fishing rivers and lakes for trout.
Also, early in the spring, we’d hit the local lakes for stockers. In other words, we fished for trout a lot—along with salmon, steelhead, and panfish of all kinds.
But it was trout fishing in one of those middling-small rivers where I learned my father’s deep, dark secret.
Back in those days we fished for trout in mountain streams with a fly rod. Most of the time you wouldn’t find a fly tied on the end of the leader, but instead there was some form of bait: salmon eggs were the ultimate, but other baits—worms, grasshoppers, caddis larvae—were also used at times.
The fishing was kind of competitive; maybe not on my father’s part, but it certainly was on mine. Every run back to camp for lunch or a drink was accompanied by the question: "How many did you get?" That was followed by a question regarding size.
Even though I would frequently catch my limit of trout, somehow Dad’s fish were larger on the average with one or maybe two lunkers thrown in.
I’m not going to say the old guy did it on purpose, as he was pretty free with his information, but invariably when he brought in a bonus bag of trout, he was using his "secret weapon".
That weapon is one largely forgotten in today’s world of high-tech lures and specialized baits. However, it’s just as effective today as it was then.
The secret he used was basic; it was a small, wire-shaft spinner with twin Indiana blades, something that Little Joe still carries—the Little Joe True-Spin spinners. While you could catch fish on the spinners with nothing more than a bare hook, my father’s "secret" was to add a small fly. The only thing is that the fly had to have a "ringed" or straight eye so that it wouldn’t cock to one side when being fished with the spinner.
Of course, I also fished the spinner and fly, but my success never matched Dad’s. He was the master.
The difference, I’m sure, had to do with the way he fished it: flipping into current seams and the pocket water behind boulders and logs. But instead of letting it drift along much as I would a single salmon egg, he pulled the spinner into the current and got those blades a churnin’.
Later, Dad told me that this lure, a spinner and fly, was the go-to lure on the lakes he fished near his childhood home in Nebraska. There he was after walleye, and he and his brother would "catch a boatload" of them in the afternoon. But that was a long, long time ago.
As I grew older, I met guys who also fished spinners like this, but instead of teaming them with a fly, they would tie a short leader to a worm hook and bait the hook with whatever was at hand, worms mostly, but salmon eggs work as well.
And later still, I ran into the kokanee fishermen on the big lakes in northern Idaho. There, a popular technique is to troll or cast large twin spinners with a short leader tied on the business end, with a small baited with a maggot or two.
I’ve also used the spinner combo to catch searun cutthroat trout, brookies, rainbows, even salmon, but that one time was an accident.
Some buds and I were fishing near a stream mouth in saltwater, prospecting for searun cutts with the old spinner-and-worm rig when a small blackmouth salmon banged the bait and headed off for the open ocean. He did come in, but it took awhile.
While that’s not a technique I’d recommend for serious salmon fishermen, it does point out how effective the combination of a spinner-plus-whatever can be.
Combining the flash of two blades seems to work better than what you might see with a larger single blade. I do know that it attracts just about any kind of fish that will hit minnows or any that just like shiny things.
That pretty much puts every species in the target list.
Trolling a spinner-and-whatever slowly along the face of a weedbed will bring a strike from whatever is there, bass, walleye, perch, trout—like I said, whatever; its appeal is universal.
For trout in streams, I would not suggest the use of a fly rod to flip the spinner into the current like we did when I was a kid. Fly rods still work in that function, but times and tackle have changed significantly, and light or ultralight spinning gear works much better, giving you longer casts.
Using a fly rod to present the spinner is a good method in smaller streams, though, because you are better able to control the drift of the spinner by mending line and you’re more interested in accuracy than distance.
Of course, using something as heavy as a spinner combo (when comparing it to a fly), you’ll find it more troublesome to cast, and a sideways lob cast is about the only one that will work well.
Using a spinner combo in lakes is a no-brainer, especially when trout are showing near the surface in splashy rises, swirls or bulges. Casting or trolling a spinner with no additional weight is a dynamite way to bang some trout. The spinner is heavy enough to hold beneath the surface but not so heavy that it sinks very far.
The Little Joe True-Spin spinners are great for use as a lure in combination with something else, like a dodger or multi-bladed lake troll particularly in the smaller sizes. However, like the kokanee guys do in Idaho, you can use spinners with the largest blades as an attractor, just as you would a dodger or flasher.
No matter how you fish them, you’ll find that the Little Joe True-Spin spinners are about as close to a secret weapon as you’ll ever need.
And Dad would be proud.