Fooling Bronzebacks with Fake Gobies
Published: Saturday, September 25, 2021
By: Dan Armitage
Invasive species have forever altered the ecology, and the angling landscape, of the Great Lakes and connected water bodies. Some for the better, some for the worse. For example, since their discovery in the St. Clair River in 1990, invasive stowaways from the Black and Caspian seas called round gobies have become key players in Great Lakes food webs. Round gobies are among the few fish that consume other undesirable invasives, such as zebra and quagga mussels, which were transported to the Inland Seas within the same ballast tanks that harbored the first goby colonists. In the meanwhile, gobies have become established as integral components of many gamefish diets.
Smallmouth bass are among several Inland Seas gamefish that have benefited dramatically from the goby invasion. While a study of Lake Erie smallmouth bass demonstrated that crayfish were the primary prey of smallies before gobies appeared on the scene, the bass rapidly converted to dining on the invasives—as often as three-quarters of the time—once the baitfish became abundant. What’s more, studies showed that juvenile smallmouth bass grew longer, and faster, once gobies became their primary forage base. A similar preference for gobies is now established within other Great Lakes gamefish, including brown and lake trout, a fact not lost on Great Lakes salmonid anglers who are getting into the goby game.
Gobies are packed with protein and much easier for predator species to catch than shiners or shad. Because they lack a swim bladder, gobies sort of hop along the bottom, especially around rock piles and gravel. That makes their action rather simple to replicate whether drop-shotting or casting fake gobies to fool predators such as bass. Unlike a traditional swim bait, a jig-and-goby combo should be dragged across the bottom, with a hop here and there. That’s because living gobies spend the majority of their time sitting atop their pectoral fins on the bottom, hopping and darting from one rocky perch to another. To cash in, savvy casting anglers deliver goby imitations via long throws and let them settle to the bottom and retrieve with a series of short hops, delivered with twitches of the rod.
I recall seeing the first artificial gobies at the local winter sport show in the early 2000s, where Great Lakes smallmouth pro Joe Balog, now of DeLand, Florida, experimented with soft plastic prototype baits for drop-shotting. They were hand-poured by a friend who developed some of the first goby molds at the request of Joe, who was curious about whether bronzebacks were eating the real thing in his home waters of Lakes Erie and St. Clair, ground zero for the invasion of the invasives. Atop the Hawg Trough demonstration tank, Balog would play with the tadpole-shaped, brown-colored baits between his popular fishing seminars, presenting them to the smallmouth bass that shared the giant aquarium with largemouth bass, crappies, bluegills and catfish.
Anyone who has spent time around the mobile fishing tanks knows that they are not exactly representative of real life fisheries, with finned occupants often reluctant to eat anything the first day or two they are in the tank, and attacking anything by the show’s end, over the course of which they may or may not have been fed live minnows to temper their appetites. So when Balog’s prototype gobies were gobbled-up by the tank’s ‘yellow bass’ and largemouths alike, he was cautiously optimistic and couldn’t wait for open water to arrive that spring so that he could present his rubber gobies to wild smallmouth bass in their natural environments.
Flash ahead two decades and you’ll find goby imitations galore in Great Lake tackle shops, a testament to the success of the baits and their appeal to bronzebacks. Both paddle and curly tail designs are offered to anglers who match them with jig heads or drop-shot rigs, and several major lure makers have jumped into the Great Lakes goby game.
Balog says the realistic soft-plastic baits “revolutionized” the Great Lakes drop shot fishery for bass, where he says the forage base is nearly 100 percent gobies. He added that when a bass hits a goby, the smallmouth pins it to the rocks by the head and then sucks it up. Both drop shot and casting versions of modern goby imitations take advantage of that feeding style.
By using larger baits, he keeps smaller bass from getting between him and the trophy-sized bronzeback he targets, which have no problem attacking the oversized fakes. Balog fishes his plus-size goby imitators in Great Lakes waters primarily in the spring and fall, and uses 17- or 20-pound-test fluorocarbon on casting gear. He suggests anglers who want to tempt the largest bronzebacks in the waters below follow suit.
About the Author
Dan Armitage is a popular Great Lakes-based outdoor writer and host of the Buckeye Sportsman show, syndicated weekly on 30 radio stations across Ohio. Dan is a certified Passport to Fishing instructor and leads kids fishing programs at Midwest boat and sport shows, and is a licensed Captain with a Master rating from the US Coast Guard.
A version of this article appeared in the Fall Issue (September/October) 2021 of Great Lakes Scuttlebutt magazine.
tags: Environmental Impact, Fishing, Great Lakes
