hooking crickets

[dwaw]

does anyone have a picture of the best way to hook a cricket? (1 pic= 1,000 words)

[NeonMoon]

I thread 'em on starting at the throat and out the bottom end. After the 1st 'gill hits 'em, they're dead or gone anyway.

[CrappiePappy]

does anyone have a picture of the best way to hook a cricket? (1 pic= 1,000 words)

No Rofl ..... but, I've always either hooked them in the neck & out the butt, or vice versa .. depending on size of fish biting. You can always tell when the little guys are after your cricket ... they'll dismember it, piece by piece, and the bite is a "machine gun" yanking effect. Larger fish will usually just grab it & go !! If I'm getting machine gun bites (but still catching a goodun, now & then), I'll put the hook in the butt & out by the head ... since they seem to go for the head, first. I've even been known to pull the hopper legs off, before putting the cricket on the hook ... so as not to give them anything to grab, that doesn't have a hook in it.

Best trick is to use the lightest weight & smallest float, and let them take it down well out of sight. If there's not many of them around, they'll pick & peck on your cricket ... but, if there's a bunch of them, they'll grab it & run off from the crowd, so they can have it all to themselves. They're greedy little buggers !! Sometimes you have to catch out a bunch of the little guys, before the bigger ones can get to your bait. However many crickets you think you'll likely need ... buy twice as many, and you still probably won't have enough

... cp

[NeonMoon]

Best trick is to use the lightest weight & smallest float, and let them take it down well out of sight.

Generally, they'll smack the tar out of a cricket. Weird thing when dad and I fished last week (and caught 50 really nice 'gills), they were biting extremely light, just barely wiggling the float. Sometimes you wouldn't even know you had a bite until you gave it a twitch, and there was a fish on already. Between crickets and wax worms, it was crickets hands-down, but you could entice a bite on the worms by jigging them a bit.

dwad, you might get yourself a few cricket hooks, they have a longer shank and make removal easier much of the time (prevents swallowing the entire hook).

[dwaw]

i've got some cricket hooks and a screened container just never tried any. are you using a split shot?

[Spawn]

Neck to butt just a couple of tiny splits to keep line alittle tight from my hook to my cork, depends on how deep your fishing, i put a shot about every foot but not as many of your using a slip cork

[NeonMoon]

i've got some cricket hooks and a screened container just never tried any. are you using a split shot?

I usually use just enough weight to stand the (sliding) float up, this allows the cricket to fall as slow as possible. When fishing shallow (3' or less), I'll use a clip-on float (just for casting weight), or "peg" the sliding float, and fish with no weight to allow the cricket to fall even slower. It mimics a cricket falling (naturally) into the water, and many times a 'gill will hit it before the slack has been taken-in.

[dwaw]

thanks for the help fellas.