Spearing decoy NDR

I like it. I've thought about making a couple of them but just never have. Do you spear?
How hard are they to get to glide right?

Tim
 
Tim,
I have not speared in years but wanted to give it a try this season. I've never made a decoy before but my neighbor has and he gave a lot of pointers about weighting and balancing.
I also spent some time watching the judges swim decoys last year at the Westlake show in Ohio and picked their brains on what works.

This one swims pretty nice with a slow wide circle and a good injured minnow twitch on the up take. I think your fin size and position will determine how your swim glide action is.

Best way to figure it out is to just knock one out and mess around with it. A lot like tweeking a deke to get it balanced and self righting.
Have some fun,
Ballard
 
Mergansers dive under the water to grab it and you spear them. It's easier then shooting them and they taste like fish so it is OK. Yeah... that's it.

Really the decoy is jigged under a big hole in the ice while someone with nothing better to do is sitting there staring down the hole with a spear in hand. When the fish, usually a northern pike, gets under the hole looking at the decoy it is speared. The spearer sits in a small heated shack called a dark house with a radio playing the nearest NFC North football game. The decoy kind of glides and turns as it falls.
I have not done it but it is one of those things I'd like to try some day.

Tim
 
Those that have done it can elaborate but my understanding is: First you cut a big hole like maybe 3 ft square in the ice. Over the top of the hole is an ice shack with the samed sized hole in the floor. You hang your weighted spear from the ceiling over the top of the hole. Put your decoy down and jig (swim) it around and then wait for a Northern Pike or Sturgeon to come into view. Drop the spear right behind the head of the fish and..........you have dinner. In some locales such as Wisconsin where we can only spear Sturgeon the fish need to be something like 50" to be legal (not sure of the exact length) so you need to be able to judge their size. Some guys even dump crushed clam shells down the hole to lighten up the bottom and better see the fish.

One of those things I haven't done..yet.
 
Most guys also submerge PVC down the hole too Pete so they can guage how big the sturgeon are relative to the PVC. Think rectangle with 4 corner weights. Helps to see when the fish glides over the white pole too.

Nice fishy Brian.
 
That's pretty cool. Does it just stay suspended in the water, heavy enough to not float but light enough to not sink?

I thought a fish spear only had one point...you learn something new every day
 
Dani, the anchor line goes up to the surface instead of down to the bottom. Usually it is tied off to a rafter in the ice shanty so it doesn't get carried awa by a fast fish or the current. Most are weighted just short of neutral buoyant and they sink slow in circles looking like an injured sucker or walleye or perch around here. Fish spears have several tines on the end like a big frog gig. Mine is about a foot wide with 6 or 7 tines but it is for summer spearing out of a boat with a 12' closet pole handle. My old spearguns were single barbed.
 
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Pete
Growing up on the Mississippi in Lacrosse my folks had a cabin on the Minnesota side and in the winter we would spear cat fish using the weighted fish decoys. In fact my dad had the record size channel cat in the LaCrosse area but that was many years ago and I have no idea what the laws on spearing are now.
wis boz
 
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