Eric gets the camera gear out to put us inside the mind of an SP minnow and how we might want to rig them to vary their action or make our fishing experience (and the fish's) better. 

Transcript:

hey it's eric here at the saltwater edge today we're going to be bringing you a new series we're calling rig or wrong in this series we're going to be discussing our personal favorite lures uh what we do to modify those lures and then we're going to be taking a look at how those lures perform in the water before and after our modifications my go-to lure here in rhode island and really fishing anywhere in the ocean is the daiwa sp minnow my preference is the six inch floating in bone um i really like the action on this uh it's a fantastic lure when fish are on the surface uh i find it works really well if i'm marking fish on the boat and uh it makes them come up come up after the the lure and it's a great search lure so if i think there's fish somewhere i'll throw this out and a lot of times it works out great for me the bone color is awesome it's a really nice bone what i don't like about this lure is the trebles i like to switch these out for single hooks i would rather lose a healthy fish than have a fish die when i'm trying to release it especially with striped bass these days i think it's really important my goal when i switch out these trebles is to not change the action of the lure at all i really like the way this lure performs with the trebles on it i like the way it swims so what i want to do is not alter the way it swims at all so what i'm going to be doing is i'm going to be switching out the split ring for an owner hyper wire 6 and a bkk lone diablo 4. i've got these pre-rigged on here and my goal is to have this not change the performance of the lure at all so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to find out how much these trebles and split wings split rings weigh and then how much these single hooks and split rings weigh and i'm gonna see if i can match those up as close as possible you can see our original stock uh split ring and treble combo and we're gonna give that away and it looks like that comes to three grams and next we're gonna weigh the uh owner hyper wire split ring and the lone diablo hook combo and i'm hoping that comes out pretty similar

and it looks like that also rings in at three grams so i'm thinking if we add these to the lure uh to that sp minnow we're not going to have much of a change in the action that's at least what i'm predicting and what i'm hoping all right so now that we know that our uh stock split ring and treble combo weigh 3 grams and our owner hyper wire and lone diablo 4 weigh 3 grams we're going to add those back to the lure and hopefully we haven't impacted the way it swims at all so we're going to add that front hook on first we took that treble off all ready to weigh it take your split rings and feed it right through

good player of split ring pliers makes this easy

so i got that front hook facing forward and next we're going to remove that rear treble removing that rear treble is really easy you just take your split ring pliers open up the split ring and then use that until it comes right off and for my rear single hook i like that to face back and up so i'm going to line that up in advance so that's facing back and up open up that split ring and then feed it on

until it snaps into place and there you have it so we find some time to go out and test both of these lures uh both the treble version and the single hook version what i'm looking for in these lures is a similar pattern similar startup speed and similar action um i'm hoping that there's no impact directly on the action of this lure and we're going to see what happens so i've got a couple videos queued up here we're going to take a look together so this is a treble video and you can see it's got a pretty quick startup um yeah i mean great action that's the action i'm i'm hoping for and anticipating um it's exactly what i would uh would expect out of the sp minnow here's another video of the treble and quick start up great action you know exactly what you want to see out of the sp on the floating version stays pretty close to the surface you know good yank you can get it down a little deeper here's a third treble video

and yeah i mean that's that's what you want to see out of the sp

and now we're going to switch over and take a look at the single hook video i'm really hoping that this appears similar because this is how i fish it and i'm hoping that it has a good action on it as well

so here's the single hook right off the bat it does look like it's a little slower to get started um you know a little a little slower on the action

but still has that nice swim pattern

definitely a little less wiggle particularly in the tail let's take another look

so here's another one a little closer up you can see that's actually a pretty quick get up and go on that i would say that it still has a little bit less action on it um i wonder if that's due to the drag that the treble hooks have versus the single hooks so the weight remember is exactly the same but the drag may be different based on that treble hook i mean the inlines are very streamlined as it's swimming backwards let's take one last look at the single hook

and yeah definitely a little slower to get up and go uh to get that action started but once it gets going it it really does look like it has similar action which is good to see it looks like there's a definite trade-off uh between the single hooks and the treble hooks um that rear treble looks like it just puts on a little more drag to get the lure working quicker um and throughout the swim pattern uh the single hook version still has great action um still swims really nicely uh and it's what i'm going to continue to fish just because uh you know i'm fishing catch and release for stripers which is mostly what i catch on these and it's easier to get them back in the water quicker less damage to the mouth better hook up in the corner of the mouth uh none of that you know gill plate marring that can happen when you have a couple trebles on a lure so it's a it's a fun experiment and it's fun to get out and and try out these different lures with different methods and uh and changing them up seeing what works uh what works and what doesn't let us know in the comments below what lures you want to see tried out you know different rigging techniques different uh hook techniques different hook styles uh you know we'd love to hear what you're using uh and what you want to see us put to the test so let us know in the comments uh like and subscribe to the saltwater edge and we'll see in the next video