from Bassdozer (169.132.100.207) 3/15/1999 7:12:00 PM
You can fish with pork rinds, and they are a deadly type of jig
trailer. If you have ever seen the Pork-O? Bill Dance made some shows
featuring the Pork-O a few years back. That is what a pork rind looks
like, but usually wafer-thin and smaller in size. Many years ago, people
used pork rinds religiously as jig trailers before rubber skirts,
silicone and soft plastics were invented for fishing. You would use deer
tail hair as a skirt, and a pork rind strip as a trailer. You would
often shoot your own deers, or get tails from someone who did, and use
the belly or back skin of a nice, fat pig to make pork rind. A
specialrazor was needed to remove the hair and any crust on the top side
of the skin, as well as all the fat on the other side under the skin.
Then you would nail a sheet of skin to a plank, and scrap both sides
like crazy to achieve the desired thin diameter. You would cut the pork
rind into pennant-shaped strips. Bleach them in vinegar for a day, and
sometimes clorox for stubborn back skin. Then cure and store them in a
big jar of heavy brine solution. Once toughened in brine, you would use a
nail and scissors to punch a hook hole and trim the final shape. Then,
you would add oily fish skins with a little dark meat still on them,
like from carp, eels and mullet, into the brine solution in the storage
jar for some taste. You could also use these fish skins as jig trailers,
and some people even stitched mullet skins into a tube to slide over
fish-shaped wood dowels or store-bought plugs (like Creek Chub Pikies)
after the skins cured in the salt. Looked just like a mullet, and the
tail action was mesmerizing and snake-like! Same thing with the eel
skins, except you didn't have to stitch them, they were tubular already.
Just slip them on and tie them at the front. The last 6-8 inches of the
tail skins of smaller eel skins were tied onto jig heads having
coin-shaped "shoulders" molded sideways behind the jig eye. You would
drill two holes through the coin on either side of the eye to let water
flow through and blow up the eel skin like a rippling ballon as you
retrieved it. You would tie it on inside out so the neon powder blue and
white color inside the skin was on the outside. Very much the color of a
soft shell crayfish. Still quite deadly today! It's a lost art and a
lost secret.
Today, most people know pork frogs, maybe pork lizards. Some even know
and use twin tail pork eels. But pork rind strips are forgotten lures
even though they still work as a good trailer on silicone and rubber
jigs. Advantages are porks durability and a fluid, rippling motion and
vibration that can't be duplicated with soft plastics, ESPECIALLY IN
CURRENT FLOWS. Disadvantages are that the pork occassionally folds over
the hook point when a bass inhales it - it is impossible to drive a
hook through the folded pork and you lose the bass. However, in
recalling many tens of thousands of ocean striped bass, largemouths and
smallmouths I landed on open hook jigs and pork rind strips, I cannot
think of more than a handful that I lost in this way. It is far more
common to lose them in this way with the bulkier pork frogs.
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