5 Excellent Tips to Prevent Fish from Running Away with Your Baits

It’s a comic situation and a disappointing one at the same time when you get excited as your bobber starts bouncing in the water, but you reel in only to see that the fish stole your bait without getting hooked! Especially in the early years of fishing, almost all anglers go through this experience. In the long run, everyone learns to stop this, either partially or totally. But applying some tips certainly speed up the learning process. Here are a few.

1. Use a Smaller and Sharper Hook

Using a small hook at the time of fishing can be one of the best solutions to the problem of fish stealing your bait. This is because there may be three reasons of fish stealing your bait – first, your hook isn’t sharp enough, or second, it’s too big to fit in the fish’s mouth, or third, the fish may be smart enough to see your hook and avoid it.

A smaller hook will easily hide from the fish’s view and it will also easily fit into the fish’s mouth.

Besides using a smaller hook, make sure it’s sharper too. A sharper hook will better stick in the fish’s mouth so they’ll find it difficult to spit it out and steal the bait.

Remember that hooks may seem sharp when you take them out for using. However, they can be sharpened further to perform better with a 1000 grit sandpaper or a sharpening stone.

2. Make Sure the Bobber is More Sensitive

Sometimes you may be disappointed to see that despite downsizing your hook, you’re unable to prevent fish from stealing your bait. In that case, you should try a smaller bobber.

A smaller-sized bobber will not only be helpful to you to see the bite sooner, but it also won’t be easily noticed by the fish.

When a fish bites your bait and senses the pull of a bobber, it will immediately spit it out and will try to get it free, instead of getting the whole bait in its mouth. This is the time when it tries to eat the worm off the hook and so, you see your bobber bouncing. But there is neither fish nor your bait on your hook when you reel in.

With a smaller bobber, the fish won’t sense as much pull while biting the bait. So, it will try to gulp in the whole bait and hook.

3. Use a Smaller Bait

Using smaller pieces of baits is another way to stop fish from eating your bait. Make sure it’s just the size of covering the hook so when a fish tries to eat the bait, it has to eat the hook too.

4. Change Your Fishing Spot

Quite often, it makes sense to change your fishing location. If your bait is continuously stolen by small fish, they are possibly gathered close to cover. In that case, just try casting out in the next spot or into deeper water.

Generally, big predator fish will be waiting just outside of the comfort zone of these small bait stealers. They will wait for one of them to swim out a little further and leap on them. In that situation, if you cast beyond the schools of bait thieves, you might end up into getting some big predator fish.

5. Plan Better Timing

It’s possible that the fish are in fact big enough for your hook and bait, but you’re setting your hook either too early or too late and missing them.

Most fish tend to hit the bait a couple of times before gulping it down. In that case, you may see your bobber or rod tip sharply bouncing. So, instead of reeling in immediately, wait till the bobber or rod tip goes down and stays there. So, you’re sure the fish has decided to eat the bait and is now attempting to swim off with it.

Use these tips and let us know if they’re useful to you to reduce the times when your hook comes out without the bait and the catch. Happy fishing!