Adding teasers to your trolling spread gives you a proven advantage as far as the boat’s ability to attract more fish.
One easy way to really get a fish fired up and staying in the spread is to give him a whiff or taste of the real deal.
There’s a simple way to do this by adding a dorado belly teaser to the back of any daisy-chain type teaser. Don’t discard this useful piece of meat from your next dolphin catch (aka mahimahi or dorado). Put it to good use!
Next time you clean a bunch of dorado, save one of the bellies in its whole form. Trim the pelvic fins off with a pair of side cutters and trim down the edges of the meat to create a streamline form.
Next, crimp or tie a piece of mono or wire through a hole that you make in the leading end of the belly. Using a bait-rigging needle and floss, sew some crisscross stitches to close up the flaps of the belly. Pass a few of the stitches through the mono loop to spread out the pulling surface area.
You can make the belly into any pattern you want but the goal is to ensure that a fish does not grab it and pull the meat off of the teaser to get a free meal! You want the belly teaser to stay on the loop. That will really get the fish fired off and they’ll keep coming back at it, before they switch off to one of the other baits in your spread or eat the pitch bait.
Slide a lure head of any type in front of the belly meat and you have a teaser that a fish won’t want to leave, until they see a naked ballyhoo swimming right next to them. You can also put this at the end of a daisy chain for more commotion, but still the taste of the real thing where it counts.
Check out another great use for dolphin bellies, trolling strips!
