Lets see em, Show us your favorite gar lures!

Well, I just recently caught my first gar on a hookless lure. I'm a fly tier, so I feel compelled to name my inventions at the vise....it's called the Dreadlock. Cotton rope, each longer strand is knotted at the ends, and a couple more knots up as well. I added some flash material too. Blue krystal flash on some. The head is superglued. I have been tying my rope lures on Demon circle hooks, just because I haven't figured out a better option and if a musky grabs it I'll hook him;)

The Dreadlock

They work......almost too well, as one of the gar I caught was SUPER tangled. The fish below was only tangled in the lower jaw.

Here's one I made during a magical two weeks I spent in TX:

Nothing too fancy, as you can see, but...

It did the trick!

Man, that was a lot of fun. This was (if I remember correctly) the best Longnose I got. Just shy of 51 inches. It was definitely the prettiest and the strongest! I'd love to tangle with them critters some more.

here's one of our plain-Jane rope lures. this one caught 10 fish on Friday.

These are some fresh lures i made today... painted on the eyes to help them stay on longer.

Your lures look great. I don't spend as much time on mine but if I was willing to I would paint the eyes too. The stickers are quick and they actually stay on quite awhile. I sometimes will put superglue over the eyes if I have any. If I have super glue I superglue the rope into the sinker so the sinker doesn't slide.

I clamp the sinker tips with pliers, it keeps it close but allows me to still change lure heads, so i can mix and match. What colors work the best would ya say?

Right now I would say white is best but I haven't done enough experimenting with other colors. If they're really biting it doesn't matter. I would try black and yellow. I would also try dying the rope yellow. The only reason I made my last batch with red heads was because I ran out of white paint and had red laying around. I call that batch the "red-headed stepchildren". They haven't caught many fish yet but I think it's more because they're too new. They need to catch some fish and get beat up and rattier.

One of the best lures I've ever used had no head at all. It was made by a guy in Ohio that I met on the GASS site. We were messaging and emailing each other and decided to swap lures. His lure was a piece of wire with a barrel swivel on one end to tie the line to and it was attached to the rope on the other end. It was very light and it sunk slowly which I think is the key to why it worked so well. The only downfall was that you couldn't cast it very far. The only weight it had was the rope after it got wet.

What kind of retrieve should one use with rope lures? Should I be using a steady retrieve, pull-pause, or what?

That is the question, i fish mine like a plastic worm texas rigged for bass, slight up and down jigs, some times in a rhythm, sometimes not, but i normally fish slow, super slow, jig it a few times, and give it a 2 to 5 second pause before i resume, sometimes i'll let it sit for al long as 15 seconds. The other way i fish is like a soft plastic jerk bait, like a slug'o. And i fish my gar poppers like a bass popper. But i have herd of different tactics for different area's... so you have to try and be inventive, and understand the depth you want to work your bait at...

How do you guys make your lures more tangle effective, it takes almost seven or eight hits on a new lure for me before it tangles well, even after i let the fish thrash it, it doesn't tangle.

It looks like your rope is strands on your rope seem thick to me. If you look at some of the other lures they are more fine. That will make a large difference right from the start. But if your strands are just stuck together try using a brush or comb to make the strands individuals instead of a few clumps.

I would agree and say you may need to brush them more. It's either brush them more or get them beat up by some gar. But when they aren't getting entangled it's hard to get them to beat the lure up. The hardest part is getting them to take a new lure and stay on it. Unless you're fishing on a day when they're hitting everything and anything they seem to prefer the old beat up lures. So if you're out on a day when they're hitting really well make sure you get a few new lures out there and let them get roughed up.

Some days there is nothing you can do to make them stay on the lure better because they mostly nipping at the tip of it. Last Friday was a day like that for us.

Pretty cool guys! Fish on!