Am I the only one who likes to catch big fish or what??? I know you guys have some baits you use for the big boyz. Don't wanna give away your secret??? Alright then, I don't know if this really qualifies as a 'big fish bait' but I caught my fair share of legal wsb and halibut this year on the fastrac minnow. Lots of guys have been asking me about this bait, so I'll just address the nation here, and make all my fastrac knowledge known.

I found out about the fastrac from a guy who owns a tackle shop in Avalon, Catalina Island. I walked into the shop one afternoon after float tubing the harbor and having nothing to show for it, and he asked me if I was fishing plastic, and I said yeah, and he shook his head and walked into the back room and came out with a chewed up fastrac minnow. He tells me about it, and I'm just like in aaww. I'm like, is this guy serious??? The bait looks totally cheezy, but those bite marks didn't lie. I was half expecting him to start laughing and tell me I'm too gullable, but the longer he talked about it, the more I thought he's either a really good prankster, or knows what he's talking about... He told me halibut will come out of 30ft. of water to eat that bait, and they'll jump out of the water after it. I'm like, yeah right, what do you do, carolina rig it??? He says, nah, fish it weightless, throw it right up onto the beach, and drag it back. He literally said if I wasn't hitting dry land, I was fishing too deep. So I picked up more than a few, and figured I'd give em a shot. I couldn't do any worse (it was pretty slow that day). I brought some home, and threw em around a little bit and pretty soon I started catching halibut and white seabass on em. I was pretty amped and I told most of my buddies about it, and most of them bought em all from Harbor Tackle almost before I had a chance to replenish my stock. That summer we fished those things a lot. I found myself using less and less green sarding and more and more fastrac. Before long I would say, I haven't caught a fish on plastic in like a month (my freezer would be full of fish...). We got fastrac fishing down pretty well. Pete took it one step farther and started trying other baits, like the shallow running cousin of the fastrac, and has had good success on that too.

For white seabass it's pretty simple. It's just a straight wind, slow to medium speed. Closer to medium. Halibut, it's more of a toss up. Sometimes they want it movin pretty good, sometimes they want it barely kickin. Most of the time it will be a medium retrieve, a little slower than the white seabass retrieve. Again, a straight wind, and throw that thing right up on the beach.

Now components. The hooks on those lures are worthless. They're super light wire, you can practically bend em with your fingers. I straightened at least 4 of those hooks on white seabass. Luckily none of them cost me fish. With the halibut we had a problem of the fish not sticking. With 3 trebles on a 4" bait (and the 5") you'd think it would be pretty well covered, but apparently not. We didn't have too much of a problem with the fish getting hooked (although sometimes when those halibut would follow it, they'd just peck at it once in a while as they followed behind it, that's when those sharp replacement hooks come in) but we did have a problem with them staying hooked. You can go with gammies, excalibur, owner, x-point, whatever you have confidence in, but I'd suggest VMC just because they're the strongest and most rust resistant, IMO. I'm usually an owner man, but I've crossed over for this application. The excaliburs do hold the fish slightly better, but they rust out pretty easily, so it makes it almost not worth it. The white seabass tended to stick better than the halibut, but you do have to swing on the white seabass, and you have to be ready for it to, cause those suckers bite out of nowhere. It'll be 100% dead and then, wham, right at the boat. Once the fish did stick initially, they were pretty much on there for good. WSB have a tendency to shake their head a lot, and move their mouths around. You can really feel em popping around down there, and that's to the angler's advantage. Those extra trebles will usually get stuck somewhere else on the fish during the fight, especially if you're using good hooks.

Ok, really briefly about gear. I think freshwater bass gear is the way to go. I started out using a Castaway STH7 which is a 7' heavy crankbait rod, rated for 10-20, 5/8-1, and absolutely perfect for this kind of fishing. I bought the rod before I knew about the fastrac, but I think the fish gods were controlling my fate that day at Wilderness Outfitters... It's got a super soft tip, and lots of backbone (although, I've had that rod bent to the handle on wsb, and I can't even pull line with my hand that hard to bend that rod even a fraction of the way to to the handle...). As for reels, and bass reel that casts well, holds a good amount of line, and has good drags will be fine. I started out with a calcutta 200XT, and now I use a curado 200. A 300 size reel is too big, stay around the 250, 200 size. If you're in a float tube, which is the best way to fish these lures, you can chase fish anyway. Ok, maybe that wasn't really brief, but there ya go.

A couple things, I like the black/chrome color the best. We've found this lure along with the spoonbill minnow and other lures of the like to be the best for this type of fishing. What would be perfect would be a fastrac minnow with a yo zuri finish. The yo zuri lures really need to be retrieved too quickly to get them kicking. Ok, that is all of my knowledge of the fastrac minnow. In the next episode, 'the castaic sardine'......
-Brian