gar fish

[MuskieBait]

I caught it in Ontario. Longnose Gar has a bony snout. The best chance you have in catching them is to use a properly sized trailer treble hook and hopefully it will find a little bit of flesh to hook into. That would be the tip of the upper jaw, the lower jaw or the corner of the jaw. Sometimes, the gap of the hook is just the right size that the hook pins into the long snout and just barely hold in place by the barb.

On average, I would be lucky to get 3 gar hooked out of 10 strikes, and I would be lucky to land 1 of the 3 since the hooks don't always stay in. There was a magical day I found lots of them and landed 5 in a day. The pictures here were from 3 of the 5 gars that day. I had a fish in the 36" size range that flopped out of my hand and left me with a bitten finger before I can snap a picture. That's what you get fishing on your own some days...