Bush 'n Beach Fishing Magazine Location reports & tips for fishing, boating, camping, kayaking, 4WDing in Queensland and Northern NSW
Do you ever ask yourself why some fishing sessions are successful though others are a bit of a dud?
I often ask myself this question because it’s not every time we go fishing that we are able to come home with a trophy fish.
In fact, sometimes we are barely able to even catch our bag limit.
For years I’ve been using similar rigs and techniques that have, in the main, been quite successful, however over the past month or so I’ve been trying new ways of catching fish.
I’ve taken inspiration from some of the techniques used by our friends across the ditch in New Zealand.
Many of their rigs are dressed up with feathers, all sorts of coloured-rubber skirts and tinsel. fishing sessions
So recently, I’ve been shopping around for something unusual and tying my rigs up in a totally different way to what I usually do.
Catch Fishing Tackle – a New Zealand based company – recently sent me some of their gear to test on our local Gold Coast fish.
Somewhat sceptically, I decided to use these rigs – even though I knew my old rigs worked very well.
To my surprise – or maybe it was luck – we’ve been able to land some remarkable fish simply by using these new methods.
I often wonder if the bigger older fish have become used to seeing the same old presentations being offered and they shy away from something they’ve seen before.
Tempting a big fish that has been around for a while and seen all sorts of bait presentations and lures can sometimes make the hook up difficult.
You know they’re there because you can see them on the sounder, but they don’t seem to want to bite. fishing sessions
The most successful rig I’ve used recently has been a small rubber skirt glued to my sinker that slides along, resembling a Kabura rig.
I run this down on top of my main hooks – two snelled 5/0 suicide-style hooks around 7-8cm.
It works particularly well because when a fish takes the bait, the sinker in the skirt can slide up the main line freely, which creates no resistance for the fish to feel and therefore drop the bait.
We’ve used this rig float lining with great success on snapper, kingfish, amberjack and cobia.
Success rates seem to be higher than normal with this change in terminal tackle.
This could possibly be because it’s something different that the fish haven’t seen before and therefore creates a situation for an impulse bite.
I use the words ‘impulse bite’ because many of the fish we’ve caught on this rig have been taken well and truly after the main bite period of the day, when the fish generally stop feeding until hungry again.
Consequently, I think the addition of the extra attraction played a part in instigating the reaction.
The photograph shows this rig using a pink luminous sinker and the green lumo skirt in a couple of suicide hooks snelled together.
Needless to say, the offshore fishing has been great over the past month and, as we come into August, the cold water will have brought many of the winter species in close to the coast. fishing sessions
