WaterOtter

Better than me - best I've found is some round bobbers and empty plastics bags. You guys are bragging, but I've got that stuff too! I lost my contacts for donating it, so this stuff has been piling up. The store price of wooden bobbers these days is shocking.

There were so many people fishing my lakes last weekend that I couldn't paddle two of them, so I went out today (Monday). Check out the left column - those all came from a single small lake. Amazing variety - a buzzbait, a rattle trap, a spoon, a crankbait, a micro crankbait, a frog, a topwater, and a Chatterbait.

Lures are all around us. I retrieved this one with a stick.

I caught a fish yesterday! I was pulling a line out of a tree and both ends led into the water, and there was a fish on it! He actually put up a good fight

Hmmm, very similar, same concept. Thanks for pointing me in that direction, I'd never heard of them. I've been looking at this lure more closely and the mismatched wire and shapes, I think someone added the spinner with their own wire, and they did a pretty good job.

This weekend I found 2 lures with great vintage vibes, in different lakes ... I think the bait with the metal lip is a J.C. Higgins Paw Paw Bass Seeker, and I haven't found info on the spinner-spoon yet. The metal lip has some surface rust, but the paint looks brand new. On the spoon, the paint looks vintage, and the skirt cannot be replaced without removing a screw that holds the wire.

Anybody know what the trailer is on this jig? I found it underwater, and it was oversized and hard. When I cut it off the jig it had a bunch of little internal pockets full of water. It looks like it was probably normal trailer size and it swelled up and hardened in the water. Gross. Be pretty terrible if that happened inside a fish's belly.

In today's finds are two rigs I haven't seen before - 1) a very large lead head with a tethered treble hook and a small plastic, and 2) a spoon with a bare lead head tied on ahead of it. Are these the new big thing? At one point I was in a shallow, stinky slough pulling up a braid that wasn't connected to anything on the business end, and I was literally thinking "I really don't want to be doing this," because I knew the line was going to be a country mile long coming from the fishing spot on the bank and it was coated with stinky muck, when suddenly the line brought up a ball of weeds, and in that ball of weeds was a brand new Whopper Plopper! After that it wasn't so bad pulling up the rest of the braid.

OMG I love it! That's a great job of photoshopping!! I went back to the original photo thinking "did I miss THAT??!" LOL The lure in the picture is actually a white blade bait with white trailer, shining up through the water. I warned you it was tricky!

Another tricky one - find the lure in this picture. a hint: it's white

I am soo envious. A job that involves being outdoors and gives you access to shorelines, trees and lures bushes containing fishing lures! That is my dream job

However, the people who left the rest of last Saturday and Sunday's haul behind left easter eggs. lol This is the year of the chunky whopper ploppers. The most I've ever found before was 4 in a year, but this year I already have 7. By the way, the big swivel on the little loon makes it a suspending lure. It dropped from the tree into the water and disappeared, but fortunately it had 3' of floating line attached, so I was able to pull it back up.

Last week I cleaned a similar plastic on a lead head out of a bush, and the long piece of line attached to it led straight out into the water. That meant it was someone fishing from a boat, and he didn't even bother to move closer to the thing before cutting his line. I was miffed. No effort to free it up, no effort to reduce the amount of line he left behind. That, in my book, is littering.

I thought the most interesting lure was the "Bob's Flies", which is a spinner with a fly with a treble hooked onto the fly. It seems like they're taking a cheeseburger and trying to make it better by adding something to it that's also already great by itself, like bacon, when really both are just as great by themselves. The most impressive "finding it" was the Googan crank, which was stuck on a chunk of wood just under the surface in a narrow, current area of the river. It looked like a large swan feather (we have a ton of those) wrapped around the wood as I zipped past, or a white piece of plastic trash (we have a lot of that too). But, I have a policy that if something looks interesting, then go back and look at it, and this time, like about 30% of the time, it was a lure. And that's how we make the dream a reality!

This was a tough one. It's a squarebill floating near the center of the picture, with only its back sticking out of the water lol It was a slightly wrong shape to be in among the brush, so I went in to investigate. It was the second of this week's finds.

Here's a good picture of a lure in the wild ...

Could you imagine, with all the fish that you catch, if you could keep them (and they didn't rot or get smelly), so you could bring them home and hang them on a display board all next to each other, and then you could compare them and keep admiring them and recalling so many good memories. Oh, and if they were small enough you could fit them all into a manageable space. Well, that's the joy of lure hunting.

Here's that 2-day haul after I cleaned them up and replaced a few rings and hooks. I'm still blown away!

I don't know if this lake is all that pressured, I think it's just been a while since anyone came around with a kayak and an extension pole and combed through the detritus along the shore. My trip worked out to 1 lure per 1/10 of a mile of shoreline, and nearly all had at least surface rust on them, even the ones in bushes. Talk about fishing pressure -- on the small lakes I fished and searched in Alabama, on peak weekends the bass boats would all move around the lake the same direction, one after the other. I think they had to leave snagged lures behind because etiquette prevented them from going in close and disturbing the fish for the next guy, who was right behind them. The most common lure brand/type I find in Michigan is Rapala minnows. I've seen on this thread where people get tired of the repetition of finding KVD square bills, but here it's those Rapala minnows. I can't get lures out of my head and it's spring break, so yesterday I went back and finished up the lake from Sunday. I have some real cleaning to do.

Sunday was my first time on this lake and I got a new PB ... for found lures. Nothing exotic, but several solid lures and nice variety. I haven't cleaned them up and replaced hooks yet, but I think 44 can swim again, 11 are too damaged, and 6 were plastics. A 3 Whopper Plopper day! I was out there 5-1/2 hrs and covered 70% of the lake, but bad weather made me pass on some up in trees and drove me off the lake. I'll be back.

I have had those exact same thoughts so many times! When I find a lure I know it could have been somebody's go-to lure that's caught a million fish and a pb, or it could have been fresh out of the box and one dunderhead cast, or snagged on a log and it was gone. I once joked about microchipping lures, but if we microchipped lures like we microchip our dogs, we could solve these mysteries! Then we could use an RFID reader to get the fisherman's contact info to get back to them. I would return all the lures I find to hear the stories of when and where and how they got away. I could also get some answers about the really wackadoodle rigs I find. lol

I want to see it how it looks once you paint it! And I would like to know how you get the old paint off. I've thrown away a lot of found lures because the paint has come off and I don't know how to clean the rest of the paint off to repaint. Also, what do you use to fill in tooth marks from the critters that chew on it on shore? ? It was a huge revelation a few years ago when I figured out the small pits in lures were coming from pointy critter teeth.

It's the hula popper from the first picture, the mouth was just barely visible in the scrub. Pictures never do it justice showing lures in the wild, but for this one you had to be right on top of it to see it.

This was my favorite find. I don't know how the picture will appear once I post it, but I was impressed with myself for spotting the little guy, and then I had to chop it our of the ice with my paddle. The wind was whipping up quite a chop, and while I was working to free this lure a wave came over the side and of course filled up my seat. My jeans and long johns were super soaked the rest of the day, but it was great to be back.

Finally got on the water yesterday and back in the game! Ice kept me out of part of the lake, but most of the lake was finally clear. I found these.