Different Techniques

[Weht Boots]

Has anyone tied a dropper fly to their lure or leader to fish more than one depth? I am thinking a royal coachman or buck-tail streamer with enough floatant would work above a jig on a slow drag maybe a wet fly or streamer under a popper would maximize bites. Besides getting bluegill to use as bait if bites are slow.

[MN Fisher]

Check the laws in your state. Here in MN, a second hook/lure like that is illegal - as is using sunfish/bluegills as bait.

[Deleted account]

Not a fly, but a dropper ahead of some lures yes. It's a surf standard. A good way to get a tiny offering out a ways when they won't bite larger lures also. 

[Fishes in trees]

This idea comes up every so often.  Back in the days when most of our information came from Field & Stream or Outdoor Life, when the early issues of Fishing Facts & Infisherman were considerred

"too technical" by most fisherman, there was a side bar telling you to do this every other year or so.

Maybe Field & Stream & Outdoor Life took turns telling you to do this - or something similar.  

Back when I was a meat fishing bush hippie I fished a "jig & popper" for a while.   This consisted of a

1/8  size crappie jig with a leader tied to the hook and 9 or 10 inches behind the jig you tied on a top water fly rod popper.  I had a few decent days with this rig, then I realized that I was getting 90% of the hits on the jig and not the popper and I was getting stuck some (bank fishing, you're gonna get stuck every so often) and then I realized that a 1/8 oz maribou jig with a little piece of plastic worm threaded on worked better and didn't get stuck quite as often, so the jig & popper became personal history.

 

With that singular exception, I can't say  that in my limited personal experiments that I've had any luck using strung together multi-hook rigs.   Several times I've read in Bassmaster that when drop shot fishing you could use a heavy jig in place of your weight - never worked for me - just got stuck a little more often.   Again, referring to the drop shot, I've read that you could stack 2 or more hooks on the line - again to cover slightly different depths.  That never worked for me - it was slightly more difficult to cast.

 

Back in the 90's Bass Pro marketed the "Missouri Rig".   It consisted of a football head jig with a wire leader coming out the back of the jig head with the idea being that you'd attach a 12' or so mono leader and have some other soft plastic trailing your foot ball head (which was generally dressed with a BPS version of a hula grub.).   The displays I saw at the Springfield BPS  recommended that you use the BPS version of the trick worm for this situation.   They were " high floaters" and on the same display they marketed a worm blower so that you could make the worms "float higher"

There were numerous pictures of the Missouri rig in action and several different ones tied up on the

 

 

 

display.   Kinda like a smaller Carolina rig with a hook & soft plastic on the main weight and a trailing,

floating , soft plastic bait tx rigged trailing along behind.   It looked cool.   I bought some of the jig heads buy never got around to trying it that weekend when I was a Table Rock, and in the brushier & weedier reservoirs that I fish week to week it didn't seem appropriate.

 

Anyway, for the original poster, just because any of these multi-hook approaches didn't work for me, that isn't any reason for you not to experiment.   If you come up within something that works for you - good.

 

Edit - no clue how the 1" space appeared in the middle of my  post and I got not clue how to fix it to make it more readable - sorry