zach

waneta getting pressure? waneta is arguably the most pressured water in all of new york for muskies. those fish have seen everything but a rubber chicken. some decent fisherman fish that lake and know what they are doing. you said that you had a problem w/ weeds, were your rod tips in the water when you were trolling? check out page 5 of lure painting if you have a second. i did a decent one today.

that is freaking awesome! why cast anymore? is he looking to get more?

just did 3 at waneta this morning from 7-11am. a 29,32 and a 50! orange tiger is what the smaller fish wanted 2x and the 50" was on that foiled black perch. fish hit 45' back over 15 fow. i thought i was snagged up for a while before i realized it was a fish. will post pics and short video in a little bit. took my last sick day at work and went fishing and it was worth it. the first fish i ever caught on a plug i made was cool. catching this 50" at 10:30am was even cooler. 50" tested and approved!

i just listened to it again and i was wrong. it took the 10" jake and believer was 10% correct. sorry about that again. here i am telling bob the wrong things.

the only advice i have is to hire rich clark. that guy seems to always get the biggest fish in the state every year. that guy is money on the larry. if i had any sort of cash flow i would hire him in a minute. i red an article by him on the st lawrence and he said he runs really really long lines. like 300-400 foot back b/c of the water clarity. long, long lines and he uses light mono instead of heavy braid like most of us. i want to say he is landing these 50lb muskies on 17lb test line. he runs lots of radke's and believers most on downriggers targeting suspended fish 25-30 feet down over anywhere from 30 to 50 fow. the dale mcnair musky was caught on a 8" black perch jake. the guys from red october jig the eddies and current areas. good luck but i here you can put some time in and not get much on the #'s side but a chance at some of the largest fish in all of north america. wishing you the fatty of all fatties but i hope your relative catches it just to make you jealous. have a nice trip and i always here 40 acre shoal and grindstone are good spots to try.

Take a look to see the action of them. It was rougher and windier than what i wanted but at least i have a short video showing what they do. Sorry about the wind and waves and i will try to get a better one up asap. I started making my first wood lures 3 years ago (have tied bucktails since i was young) and have something good, in my opinion, after doing around 2 dozen prototypes and most not working how I wanted. Well I finally got it I believe, and these guys have a wandering action new to the deeper diving plugs. These will run 6-8" from side to side instead of a straight line which was my goal. You can see some of that in the video. I fished from sun up to 11am and went 1 for 2 w/ a 39" taking the orange tiger around 20 down. The happy hooker has about 20 of them and will get more before spring and Hogan's Hut placed an order for 40 by spring time also! These dive deeper and have more action than the original Tuffs that I am such a fan of. These are also made with better, thicker stainless hardware, lips, hooks and have a more protective clear coat. My goal is to make each one the exact same from everything from lips to hole placement to weighing out 6.5 grams of lead to weight them with. Still have yet to have one blow out while trolling no matter what speed I go. Guide Mike Sperry will be testing these out and i want to have Cpt Larry run them also. After leaving Chautauqua i stopped by Cassadaga lake as I have thought about trying it out for years, since I haven't been there in almost 10 years. As I was getting the boat ready I start talking to this guy and ask him if thats a Newman Jerkbait. He says yes and that he makes them. Well I just shook hands with Rich Newman (one of Ellwood PA's finest) and start talking about baits and this and that. He invites me out to show me Cassadaga and we go out throwing his Newman Jerks. He told me he averages 5-6 for each 1/2 day he puts in there. We went out for 3 hours and did 4 and saw many other follows and Cassadaga is the place to go for numbers. You can contact him @ 724-944-8123. He was a really cool person and he even took 2 plugs off me to try and get my name out there, since he liked the action of the lures. Thanks for following me on this bait-making adventure that I have started on. Good fishing, and I am happy with my product. I hope that if you try one you will be also. Thanks for your time! Zach Baker.

old man- gustofson and solgrande have been doing that for at least 2 years that i know about. they tried to bring me to the dark side. they call it the "berger king" rig after 1000 island guide dave berger. big believer w/ a big flutter spoon 18"-24" behind the lure. they have been doing that up there for years and there was an article in muskyhunter maybe 3-4 years ago about it.

well i have been learning the trials and tribulations of lure making and finally came up with something good enough to share. these are handmade out of cedar like the old tuff shads were but are made even tougher imo. i used .061 wire for the lips instead of the small .045 wire which seemed to go out of tune pretty easily. i used the absolute best hooks i can buy (vmc conecuts) and wolverine triple split rings. double thick epoxy clear coat and lots of pearls that don't really show up in the pics. i did these colors they way they are a request from brian at the happy hooker. these babies wouldn't blow out no matter what i did ( went up to 7mph doing turns and they hold dead nuts) when testing them. i use a very low horizontal ballast to make them run like that at such speeds. it took a lot of experimenting with weighting and lots of cedar for firewood but i finally got it correct. deeper diving then a tuff shad that seem to not go any deeper than 15 feet, i can get these babies to 25 feet deep w/ around 130 feet of line out. lost my best lure so far at waneta snagged on the bottom in 25 fow and i broke 100lb power pro trying to get it out. i wrapped my line around a boat cleat and drifted off to see what was stronger, my plug or 100lb powerpro braid. well the line broke first. 5 coats of sealer make sure that these won't split or crack on you for years to come. if anyone ever has a problem w/ them i will do what ever i can to make it right. custom colors are always an option and i will do anything you want with in reason. so far in the last 4 times out i have caught 5 and lost 4 on my lures. i have around 150 more bodies of this style and around 25 of a larger slimmed out size similar to a perch bait. if anyone is interested in them please contact me here or at 585-414-0138. one reason for me doing these other than having what i consider a good plug is the shop i have wrenched cars at for 6 years is closing in less than a month and i wouldn't mind taking a break from getting banged up and greasy working on cars. thanks for your time and here are some pics of what i am bringing to chautauqua to go up in the shop. if anyone buys even just one thanks very much it will help my family out.

lips- you like hook stories? heres one, last week when i was organizing my lures to take out fishing the night before i was hanging up lures in the basement on this big peg board i have on the wall. i put up a bunch and grabbed a lure that had some nasty vmc conecuts on it. as i was hanging it up, little colton come over and gives me a superman hug pushing me off balance and i ended up with a 3/0 almost all the way through my right pinky. the tip of the point was coming right through the tip of my finger w/ it in my finger past the barb. trying not to freak out w/ my 2 yr old there i held the lure trying to decide what to do. i couldn't pull it back out, didn't want to go to the doctors either so i had to pass it all the way through until the barb came through and since this was in my right hand i couldn't cut the hook w/ my left hand so i had to roll the barb over and pull it back through. fun times! amazingly it healed up perfect but i was lucky and didn't have a fish connected to the other hooks. take care. zach

well, since we have hijacked larry's thread all ready i will add some fishing p*rn from last night. spent half of my 3 hours out there tuning cranks but this little guy thought that foiled perch was for dinner but this one had hooks and most likely didn't taste the way he wanted it to. lost one other on that same lure that i had on for 4-5 seconds and my so called "perfect storm" never really happened. i was expecting way higher winds and some nasty rain but it never happened. oh well at least i didn't get soaked. floating weed were as bad as i have seen them all year. shallows were pretty much off limits last night b/c of the 20lb globs of floating junk weeds all around it. P.S. chad- how deep are those "mud-sharks" you are catching? gonna give it a try sooner or later, i have downriggers in the garage but have never put them on the boat yet and i don't know what i am waiting for but eventually. P.S.S. thanks joe esox- i have been playing around alot w/ lures and i finally think i have the best lip/ weight/ length combo figured out for my style of fishing. these babies are as good as any deep diving shad style lure i have used IMO and the fish seem to hitting them also which doesn't hurt.

good luck. i want to go! lexie and i will be there next weekend for 2 days. this is one of the fish on my new lures. 6 hits on this one lure in 2x out and is now resting on the bottom of waneta after i found out it can hit 25 ft. these are two of a bunch i am bringing to chautauqua next weekend. foils look cool to me, i have a bunch of firetiger, orange tiger, redhorse, and perch colors and i hope to only run my lures. we will see.

old man- good luck and good fishing.

11 hours out, put 41 miles on the triplog yesterday and 2 small one to show for it . good news is the rockets never got touched, the perchbaits never got touched but my lil sweeties got 2! tough day to be out but fine tuned the sweeties to run fast and deeper than a tuff shad. its all in the weighting and lip. now i have about a dozen prototypes for fire wood this winter that didn't perform how i wanted. nice job again bob!

that is what i plan on doing for some suckers. my kids pool.

thats how you do it bob!!! fattie for sure. those musky rockets are nasty huh? that guy must think your last name is BUCHER. Good job once again, you are making up for lost time quickly! hope i can get one like that tomorrow when i am down there!

bty i always thought canadice was the nicest water i fished (ice fish) but when my dad just moved down there he was told that it had the highest PCB levels of any finger lake. i quess that there was a guy up on the hill that used to scrap transformers and over the years all the chemicals washed it the 'dice and is still in there. wait until solgrande posts some pics from yesterday. he heard that drag rip once or twice!

at conesus i have actually gotten all of my tiger this year ( on the phantom softtailed jerkbaits. haven't been there in awhile but it is fun. if you don't want a plastic lure and don't want to spend big $$ on wood baits i am at a loss. wood lures are more expensive and i believe each one if different. if i could reccomend anything to start it would be to get a wiley, a tuff shad and a perchbait. i have said many times that i think a person could run these 3 lures all year and do as well as anyone else who has 500 baits like solgrande does. they have been proven time and time again in this area but cost good $. check ebay for good deals, i have picked up tons of baits on there. good luck and make a note of everything cpt larry says and that should point you in the right direction. my love for pike fishing also led me to be stuck on muskies for over 15 years now and am 31 years old now. bty august seems to be a great time to throw topwaters. if i could only recommend one topwater it would have to be a joe bucher topraider. easy to fish, "fairly" inexpensive and they do well.

i have heard that crappie work also. probably any panfish will do. problem is i never cast long enough to do it. cool to know for those tough days.

got to fish yesterday morning and the weather was great to be outside but not for fishin' . took lex out at 7am and got this one 10 minutes into our day. . (that is NOT the bell tower behind her lmao) she was happy and by 8:15am she convinced me to go get breakfeast at camp chautauqua where we were staying. ate some bacon and eggs and went back out sometime after 9am. well we get back out to where we were fishing another fish is on less than 30 minutes into our pass. she got it but was wearing her bikini and made me hold it for the pic b/c she didn't want all you looking at her. i laughed and held the lil guy we worked that area for awhile before leaving and i missed another one that was on for less than 6 seconds. oh well. head towards the casino for lunch and lose another one 10 feet from the boat at the no wake signs off the casino. we ate some greasy food at the casino and then decided to walk around bemus. we ended up renting bikes and taking the rest of the afternoon peddling around the small town. we fished for a total of less that 6 hours and went 2 for 4. i am starting to get better about realizing that i am fishing w/ my son's mom and not some hardcore musky fishermen. she loved taking time off for breakfast, lunch and the couple hour bike ride we took. i would have stayed out fishing until dark but i knew she would enjoy seeing something other than the boat and my ugly mug. i think it was a total success and we left by 6pm to go get the little goober. all fish came on my prototypes w/ hits on all differant colors. some of my lures ran killer and some need alittle weight to make them handle speeds better. it was cool b/c these muskies were on the lures i whipped up this week and wanted to try out. well they got eaten alright. i had to fish these new lures b/c i gave all my good ones to solgrande this week! all fish hit going fast and lexie has a new favorite color, she now likes the "pretty baby" color. its a good thing b/c those are easy to paint! i started a cool barnyard fight by not feeding the king billy and i really enjoyed watching them butt heads and chase each other around. oh the fun that can be had at the campground! on the way home i stopped into the happy hooker to get solgrande and myself some perchbaits and brain asked me what we got our fish on and i showed him my "little sweeties" and he said he wants a couple hundred dollars worth of them to put into his shop! i showed him a couple of bucktails and he said the same thing! how freaking awesome. i now have a little side job brewing. these were the two that boated fish for us. also the silver perch types got blasted 2x. i did all these in one morning so the paint jobs were just enough to get them done. next batch will be alot nicer paint jobs since i will actually have more than one day to get some ready.

i enjoy casting a lot more than more than trolling but trolling can be very effective at times. this weekend all of lex's and my fish came from places that would be very, very difficult to cast to. there is a strong movement back into the weeds coming up and this will get me casting again. give me a sunset on a nice day i stop trolling and throw on one of my favorite topwaters and go to work. you have a big fish explode on you and your hooked. to me thats as exciting as it gets. i complain the same as you do about nothing local but this year i have gone to conesus a half dozen times and have found the tigers fun and at times tough to get. i cast at conesus and find its a blast working jerkbaits for them around the weeds. good luck and i fully understand your situation and wish that i didn't have to drive 80 miles to the closest musky lake. i hope that one day you get out and get to experience what drives some of to almost obsession. casting is fun and i cast for myself, trolling can get boring but it puts fish in the boat. both have there times.

good luck to anyone going out the next couple of days! off to chautauqua to try to get lex some fish! she wants to beat her personal best 2x this year. she hasn't been out since she got her new best during the first tourney, she has yet to lose one also. thats alot more than i can say for myself.

sounds great! lexie and i are leaving to tomorrow night and i better get her on some fish or i'm gonna get to hear about it. was there 2 weeks ago and didn't do as well as i wanted to fishing the south end (tons of bait south of 86 bridge). thanks for all of your info. i read every post you make and take everything you say as word. thanks again larry! i have no problem at all fishing that fast, in fact that is where i do most of my summer fishing, over 5mph except at night. i think from what i have seen people tend to go faster at chaut than waneta but people at waneta make more turns on purpose imo. i try to combine the two. go fast and tons of turns, if you have seen my ugly butt on the water you know what i mean. a drunk guy makes a straighter line than i do while trolling. maybe her and i will see you out fishing, we are staying until saturday morning and i would hire you but i am poor and have a two year old kid, so nope- it ain't happening any time soon. i am refinishing that big 16" grandma copy i got from you, what should the color it be in your opinion? i am going to bring a bunch of homemade crankbaits to try to decide what style i am gonna roll w/. good luck.

giving away all your tricks. big or small gills or doesn't it matter?

awesome colors thanks!!!!!! $9 bass is a favorite of mine for clearer water.