Creek Salmon eat Skein, but staging Salmon Don't bite

[Traveling Circus]

It's pretty tough to floss a fish with a gob of skein fished under a float in an estuary type setting. To imply that it takes "expert flossers" to catch kings in the creek is incorrect. 

[Lucky13]

I was trying to make the point that there might be some guys who floss, not that everyone flosses.  Skein below floats was pretty much a Genesee thing for a few years there, and unless you hoof it back pretty far in Pulaski, you are going to be too crowded to fish a float.  And I never said anywhere that it is impossible to catch kings in a stream setting, I've caught a bunch on flies and eggs, I've seen them  caught one after another on fire tiger raps with the trebles swapped out for a single down at Seth Green, and single blade spinners can also work wonders on them.  What I have experienced is that they don't necessarily bite continuously, but what game fish does?

[Sk8man]

As far as the original concern of the post there are a number of aspects to the behavior of fish whether in the stream or out in the lake that are of interest in this issue. If you have ever watched fish in clear water in the stream or while ice fishing peering down a hole it is clear that fish explore objects or their potential meals often times with their mouth or nose and it may relate to actual feeding or just curiosity, or perhaps other things like instinctual getting rid of competitors potential offspring as in (possibly) ingesting eggs gliding along  or resting on bottom of a stream. I have seen landlocks, perch and walleyes through the ice "bump" a variety of potential food sources with their noses without opening their mouths, I have seen landlocks, perch, and pike inhale bait and expel it without the line seeming to move. Fish do a lot of "testing" of objects (probably for a variety of adaptive reasons) including bait, and in the stream this behavior may be first noted as a "line stop" rather than a "bite" per se and the alert fisherperson aware of this "nuance"  "sets" when it occurs. The fish may or may not be actually feeding on the object whether egg sack or not but the success rate in hooking fish can be increased significantly by being particularly sensitive to this exploratory behavior rather than waiting for "bites", and it may separate the success rate of individual fisherpersons.

Edited September 19, 2019 by Sk8man