Very well written! I might have some solutions to your loosing fish on my bait. A while ago I swung on a large bed fish only to have her open her mouth and just spit the bait with none of the hooks getting stuck. I thought about for a second and pulled the bottom treble out of the baits belly and let it swing freely. The next cast I hooked her in the upper lip with the top hook but by the time I lander her two of the three trebles had burried themselves in the inside of the lower jaw. I now always bed fish with the treble hanging this way.
Another thing to try is to run a stinger out of the tail. I have had at least 10 diferent guys tell me this is how they keep from losing bed fish. The method is to thread wire or heavy braid from the hook eye through the body of the fish and crimp or tie to a small(size 1 or2) treble with one of the hooks imbeded into the top of the tail. I have not personaly tried this because I have had succes with the hanging treble so I dont know how this will efect the swimming action of the bait but it should definatly help in landing big fish.
One interesting note about bluegill baits is the way the bass hit them. I have yet to deep hook a bed fish with my bluegill but I have hooked several deep while casting and retreiving the bait. I think the diference is a bed fish wants to kill the bluegill and a feeding fish wants to eat it. I am going to rig up a tail hooked bluegill and send it to Rob for him to experiment with.
A little more history about my bluegill. When I first started making prototypes I was designing a bed bait. The tail action was not very important to me. After a little while I went back and redesgined the bait to swim how I wanted too. I am almost embarassed at how ugly those first ones were. Thank God I learned how to paint. If you guys have any of the original baits, burry them!

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