Doing the Sailfish Tease
As seen in Saltwater Fly Fishing,
Oct/Nov. 2004
© 2005 Jim Zech
We are about 30 miles directly west of the mouth of the Golfo Dulce, just north of Panama in Costa Rican waters, and the seas are moderately rough. In these latitudes the Pacific Ocean is genuinely pacific, so "moderately rough" means that there is 2 foot of chop over 4 foot of swell running at a period of about 15 seconds–barely rough enough to spill your beer if you set it on the gunwale. When the seas are calmer you can more easily spot fish on the surface. Right now we are looking instead for birds to help us locate fish, sailfish to be exact.
The
ocean looks dark and inky blue at 10a.m., but that could be the effect of the polarization of
my sunglasses. I tip them up and the sea turns to a blinding silver shimmer. I put my
glasses back on and this reminds me to be more aware of the effect of the polarizer on
the lens of my camera. We are 30 miles out in the pacific Pacific at 10 in the morning
trolling hookless teasers in an effort to bring some sailfish near enough to the boat so
that we might present to them a cast fly. We are also hopeful that if we are lucky enough
to get them within fly cast range of the boat that they will be mad enough or hungry enough
to eat the fly. Sometimes they aren’t which brings me to the subject of this short
article, which is what you might try to get them excited when they act lazy and full.
For those of you unfamiliar with the technique used to fly fish for sailfish, (a technique used as well as for some other pelagic species), the technique usually runs something like this: get yourself a boat, a big boat capable of safely driving around in the big blue ocean miles and miles offshore away from the firm, comforting, and solid soil of land…well, let’s just assume that you have access to a boat rigged for offshore trolling. Only one outrigger is used, the one which is on the side of the boat opposite from that where the caster is standing. From this outrigger two lines are generally run, a short line with a big chugging teaser on the inside, and then a long line with a smaller teaser run off the tip of the outrigger. The short line is usually run through the outrigger directly onto a reel attached to the boat near the wheel. That way the guy driving the boat can crank this teaser in without leaving the cockpit. The long outside line is run through a release clip and off of a rod. One more is usually run directly off a rod from the side of the boat opposite the outrigger or directly off the transom.
This is a basic schematic of a teaser pattern. Most captains and/or deckhands will have their own personal variations on the lengths that each teaser is run from the boat; sometimes the outside outrigger teaser is run longest, sometimes the rod run directly off the opposite gunwale or transom will be longest. Almost always the big inside outrigger teaser is run shortest.
The two long teasers are frequently plastic skirts of various and sundry colors with heads of various and sundry colors. (I have noticed that different crews have their favorite color combinations and change them depending on the conditions. However, I have also noticed that different crews each insist that their color combinations are the best for the given conditions and have been proven to be so from experience. Furthermore, I have noticed that from my experience with different crews using different color combinations during these different conditions that their success ratios are correspondingly arbitrary and I’ll just chalk that up to my not having nearly enough blue water experience to discern the subtle differences in their success rates.)
Sometimes a bird or daisy chain of plastic squid will be run off one of the long teasers, or even more commonly off the short inside teaser, but that fact isn’t really germane to this discussion. What is somewhat germane is that that the long teasers are frequently “augmented” or “flavored,” if you will, with the attachment of a sewn belly strip of fish. (The belly of a fish is generally the most fatty part, hence the most flavorful. That is why the belly, “toro,&rdquo: commands the top dollar at the sushi bar.) The strips are ldquo;sewnrdquo; to give them some extra durability as they will, hopefully, be repeatedly attacked by the sharp and abrasive bill of sailfish. Some captains do not bother with the belly strips and tell you that they make no difference. In this I beg to differ. I have seen it to be true that fish chasing a baited teaser and allowed to grab it occasionally and taste it will be more likely to stay on that teaser and will also be more aggressive to the fly that replaces it. Also that fish will be more likely to eat that fly when the time comes, and that is most important.
The time has come quickly. We’ve been trolling for only about 10 minutes and a sail has come up to the teasers. My friend Stan is on the fly rod, so it is my turn to man one of the teasers. The crew puts me on the long one that the sailfish is not chasing, of course. I crank my teaser in as quickly as I can wind so that it is out of the water and not distracting the fish. We need the sailfish to focus on the single teaser which the cast fly will replace. Oliver Martinez Lopéz, the capitan, has cranked in the short outrigger chugger. Aldomar Lopez Morera, the mate, is deftly retrieving his teaser, enticing the single sailfish toward the boat. There is an art to the retrieval of the teaser. Some crews prefer the speed method and crank the teaser at the boat with extreme rapidity, apparently thinking that what the sailfish cannot have it will want more ardently. In my opinion this is artless and not the most effective. Others like a more alluring retrieve, allowing a sail to play with its food and bome familiar with it. Aldomar chooses the middle way. He retrieves rapidly, but not so quickly that the fish cannot bat the teaser with its bill and grab a little taste of the belly strip.
This particular sail is not on fire. He had initially bill-batted the teaser, but then lost some of his ardor and patrolled behind the teaser, merely looking up its skirt. When the fish was drawn to within 40 feet of the transom Oliver had Stan cast as Aldomar yanked the teaser into the boat, but the fish sank out of sight and wasn’t interested in the fly. Aldomar had pre-baited a dead jurelito, or goggle-eye, which is a 10 inch tough-skinned fish, on a spinning rod and cast it back into the blue. This dead bait lazily rolled in the surface chop behind the boat as Aldomar slowly cranked the reel with the rod held tip high. Nothing else happened. The sailfish did not rise to the bait.
Aldomar factually stated, “Vela no hambre,” or possibly, “Vela no hombre,” meaning either that the sailfish wasn’t hungry or that the sailfish was not man enough–my Spanish isn’t very good. Either way he meant that the fish wasn’t going to eat Stan’s fly, it just wasn’t excited enough.
We had flown to Crocodile Bay Lodge from San Jose (Costa Rica) early that morning, threw our bags into our rooms and grabbed some gear and headed out to the dock where our boat was waiting for us ready to go. We headed out toward the blue water, but before we rounded the corner to go outside of the Golfo Dulce and into the Big Blue, Oliver the Capitan thought that we might try to tease up a morning roosterfish from just outside the surf line a few miles from the lodge. Aldomar had then rigged up for roosterfish teasing.
The method frequently used for fishing for roosterfish with a fly is to troll a live bait very slowly. These baits, in our case giant sardines, are rigged with no hooks, but instead a length of heavy floss is strung just above their eyes and just underneath their bony pate. The monofilament from the reel is then attached to this floss. (Floss is used because it is flat and soft and less likely to tear through the sardine as it is cast, or as it is mauled by a rooster.)
Sometimes as you are trolling you can feel the bait get nervous; it’ll swim to one side, speed up, and just get twitchy and feel a bit different through the rod. This is a good indication that a predator has intentions on your bait. When this happens, or when something actually yanks on your sardine, you crank the bait up toward the boat, predatory fish hopefully in tow, jerk the sardine into the boat, and cast your fly–maybe a popper, maybe a streamer–and start it working. If things go well a rooster will eat your fly. Since roosterfish are really smart and wary, this happens with a remarkable infrequency. What is more often the case is that a rooster will swim up to your fly with its eye mere inches from it, give it the once over, and then decide not to eat it. If there is more than one rooster around they may get competitive with each other and your odds of having one actually grab your fly go up. If there are also some jacks around then your odds of catching a fish are better yet, although that fish will now probably be a jack. The salient point of this whole description is that it is a live bait that is used as a teaser bait.
Since we had been fishing for roosterfish (unsuccessfully) earlier that morning we still had some of these live mega-sardines in the tank. And since our first sailfish of the day was a bit lethargic and had a lackadaisical attitude toward the dead bait, Aldomar rigged one of the leftover live sardines as an extra enticement in case the next sail behaved similarly. It did.
This sail came into the teaser spread and was brought within easy casting range of the boat. The teaser was yanked into the boat, the fly was cast, and ignored, and the sailfish disappeared from view. But this time Aldomar grabbed the spinning rod rigged with the live sardine and tossed it back off the transom a good 60 feet. After a short moment Aldomar smiled, then gave the rod a jerk, apparently to get the sardine out of the sailfish’s mouth, and said to Stan, “Get ready”.
Aldomar cranked the reel moderately quickly, pausing his retrieve occasionally, and then flipped the sardine out of the water and into the boat as Stan cast his fly. The fly smacked the water where the giant sardine had exited. Stan gave his fly line a quick jerk to cause the popper head to dig into the water and create a big “pop.” A moment passed and then a bill came out of the surface of the water and whacked the fly. Stan did not set the hook and instead let the sailfish take the fly and turn away from the boat. He then set the hook and the set was good. The water erupted into a white hole with a sailfish sticking out of the middle, half in and half out of the water.
I don’t recall if Stan landed this particular sailfish–he probably did; we weren’t using IGFA leaders, preferring instead to make leaders with about 3 feet of shock tippet to at least equal the length of the sailfish’s bill, and with 25lb. class tippet. So if the hook set was solid we were usually able to land the fish. Sometimes getting a solid hook set, as those of you that have fished for sailfish know, can be a bit problematic. My only advice for getting a good set is to somehow be able to get the hook to bite in the mouth hinge of the fish. I’ve heard and read other anglers describe how best to make this happen, where to place your fly in relation to the fish, when and how to set the hook, what kind of hook is best, etc., and I’ve even made some proclamations of the sort myself. I will now say only that a sailfish will react to a fly unpredictably. Try to cast your fly so that the sailfish will turn away from you when it takes,
and hopefully it will end up in the hinge.
The point of this article is that using a live teaser entices fish more than does a dead one.
On this trip, and on others, captains that I have fished with who have not used a live bait as a teaser have not gotten as many takes on the fly, all things being equal. It would be impossible to make a truly scientific trial of this hypothesis, but in fishing we often insist on following mere hunches that have far less or even no evidential support than the support that I’ve seen for this claim. When a sailfish is hell-bent for leather and hot on a teaser it is almost a sure thing that it will take a cast fly. It is the fish that is under stimulated by the teaser that needs the extra enticement of a live bait. I will say that it worked every time we tried it on this last trip to Costa Rica, when the dead bait had far less success revving up a sluggish sail. Although they undoubtedly did not invent the technique, Capitan Oliver and his mate Aldomar are truly onto something using live bait as sailfish teasers.
