Hey all,
I hooked a fat 12" rainbow on a perch colored Rapala near the shore the other day, and because he inhaled the treble hook wholly, I had to keep him.
The interesting part was the contents of his ridiculously engorged stomach. Small snails, still in thier shells, from his throat to his pooper. They were slightly smaller than pea-gravel.
Do ya'll have bait/lures/techniques for this feeding pattern?

I've seen the same thing on occasion. I don't know what you'd use for conventional methods,but the fly guys may have a pattern.

I've seem some snail flies. They were so small though that I don't see how you could cast them without a ton of weight. You might be able to find snails in pet stores. I guess they use snails on the inside of glass fish tanks to keep the algae down. Don't know if you could get in trouble for this. Because if the snails could get away live and hurt the lakes natural ecosystem, you might not be able to use live ones. Just something to check into.

I think the gamies would have a problem,with you using non-native species for bait.

there are a lot of snails in lake sawyer. when i was younger, we would snorkel in the lake and gather them for bait. we would shell them first and catch tons of perch. the shells were about the size of a quarter, we didnt use the really small ones, not much meat on the little ones.

Ah snails.....a topic dear to my heart. The answer to Dry Falls trout when
they get all pissy and quit biting.
Snails are the commonest of trout food seldom if ever fished with,even
by the flyfishermen.
When I waz plumbing the depths of dry falls to set my chronimid with a
small lead, bell shaped sinker on it, I kept getting hit as I brought it up
from the depths. Finally the Light bulb came on. They think the bell
sinker is a SNAIL.
I tied a reasonable pattern this winter using wraps of black float foam wrapped
around the shank, Try for three wraps of increasing size and leave room
for a grey wool beard on top. Then coat the whole thing with "Soft Body" a
brand of super glue. Oh, I weighted the hook shank on some to make sinkers.
Will fish them just off the weeds under a strike indicator.
Can hardly wait to try it next year.

Snails are very often over-looked... My favorite pattern for fishing snails is very simply a ball of peacock herl and one or two turns of brown hen for a collar. Also, this is a good pattern for those pellet feeders!

Downriggin'

Yeah, I saw that pattern too but didn't like it. I built one looks much more
realistic and you can color it any color with panatone pens if you use
white float foam. I notice many lakes have different shades of shell color.

The best pellet fly on Rufus Woods is a Yellowish flesh fly pattern.
I heard of a guy who took a 15# there on one last month,but I think he had
LEAD on his leader.....tisk,tisk,tisk.