Good Vibrations… Bill Lewis originated the lipless, vibrating lure better known as the Rat-L-Trap—one of the all-time great lures for bass fishing.
But, wait for it, it’s not only a good bass lure, it also scores very well when fishing for walleyes, panfish and assorted other warmwater critters. The biggest pike I ever caught (over 44 inches and probably topping 20-plus pounds) hit a lipless, vibrating bait.
So what does this have to do with salmon, trout or steelhead you ask? Well, I can’t speak for steelhead, but the Rat-L-Trap is a killer on trout. It also, speak this softly as it is supposed to be a closely held secret, is superb when fishing from shore or piers for Great Lakes salmon.
I can’t testify for the latter, nor can I extend that to salmon off the beach in Puget Sound, but I will say that the Rat-L-Trap is flat deadly on trout of all sizes.
That doesn’t mean that all Rat-L-Traps work on trout (or salmon or steelhead) as the largest size, the 3 ½-ounce Bluewater series is big enough to scare most trout. Having said that, I caught four blackfin tuna on one this past fall. Tuna? PB pike? You can see why I am enamored of the Rat-L-Trap.
But I digress. The best trout sizes are the two smallest in my opinion. Most of my trout fishing with Traps is done with the 1/8-ounce size, but I’ve caught enough trout on 1/4-ounce Traps to know they’re in the zone. Definitely, it’s a matter of size—of the fish—as the larger the fish, the more likely it is to hit a larger bait.
The attraction of the Rat-L-Trap is based on several things. First is the vibrating action. Next is the sound—this style of lure is often called a “rattlebait” as they have enough shot of one kind or another to make a loud rattle.
An interesting fact came out of a study by the University of Washington School of Fisheries that showed the sounds produced by Rat-L-Traps was a close match for those emitted by a school of shad. Granted, we don’t have that kind of shad in the Northwest, but still that is something to think about.
Lastly, with 30 color choices in the Tiny (1/8-ounce) Trap, there are plenty of options, from fluorescent pink to natural crawdad to chrome.
One of the things that makes these lures a favorite of mine is that they can be fished in so many ways. The entire family, with the exception of the Floating Traps introduced last year, is sinking lures.
So you can fish them at all depths, from the surface by reeling quickly, which works when the trout are rising, to the bottom of the lake directly under your boat as a jig.
As for salmon, well, I can’t say that I’ve tried it yet. However, Wes Higgins, president of the company, says that a few Great Lakes guys who use Traps for salmon there swore him to secrecy. “They said it was deadly,” Higgins says, “But I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.”
I’m pretty sure that if you fish it for coho, you’ll be surprised at how effective it can be. I’ve done well—remarkably well, actually—casting minnow-shaped floating lures for staging coho using bass gear. You can imitate the same type of cadence as I did—jerk, pause while the bait sinks and reel in the slack, then jerk again.
If you think of this latter method as “twitching” but using a lure instead of a jig, then you’ve got it down.
For more information on Rat-L-Traps, go to: www.rat-l-trap.com