By Stephen Booth

Ever since the release of the 3” Bass Minnow, jerkbait plastics have held a special place in my fishing arsenal. The way you can make them dart around and drop through the water is irresistible to predators from the fresh right through to the deep ocean reefs.

Ever since the release of the 3” Bass Minnow, jerkbait plastics have held a special place in my fishing arsenal. The way you can make them dart around and drop through the water is irresistible to predators from the fresh right through to the deep ocean reefs.

While the 3” Bass Minnow proved immensely popular with anglers chasing bass and bream, those anglers fishing a little wider of the coast and a little deeper were searching for other options. These other options arrived with the release of the 5” Jerk Shad and the Gulp! range of minnows. The Gulp! range had models from 3” right up to 5” in the minnow patterns and snapper anglers lapped up the bigger, fatter versions of the jerkbait-style plastic.

Recently the 7” Gulp! Jerkshad hit the market and this latest release has continued the domination of Gulp! plastics in the soft plastic market in Australia.

Reefing them out

Ever since the whispers of a 7” Gulp! Jerkshad filtered through to me I’ve wanted to get hold of some. There were two very important reasons for this. The first is my desire to catch a 1m long flathead on a cast lure and I know how good the 5” Gulp! Jerkshad is at catching big lizards so I thought a 7” model would up the ante just a little bit and perhaps provide a bigger meal for a bigger fish. The other reason was a pending trip to Weipa where on previous sojourns we had amassed plenty of fish on the 5” Gulp! Jerkshad and the 5” Powerbait Jerkshad. We really wanted to upsize the fish we were targeting and going up to 7” seemed like a great idea.

While I haven’t caught that metre long flathead yet, plenty of flatties over 60cm have fallen to the 7” Gulp! Jerkshad. And as for the Weipa trip, well all I can say is if you plan to go up north to fish some reefy areas and you don’t have a few dozen packets of 7” and 5” Gulp! Jerkshads you are doing yourself a serious disservice.

Let’s have a look at some of the extraordinary figures and fish we caught on our ‘testing’ trip to Weipa.

The players

With me on the trip were two of my best fishing buddies Adam ‘Mad Dog’ Royter and Dirk Wendt from Melbourne. We hooked up with Josh ‘Catfish’ Lyons from Dave Donald Sportfishing to make a team of four keen anglers who really wanted to nut out some sort of pattern. The tackle varied from angler to angler with Adam using a Berkley Tactic 3-5kg rod, Shimano Stella 4000FB loaded with 10lb and 14lb Berkley Fireline, Josh and Dirk using Daiwa Coastal rods matched to 3000 sized Shimano reels loaded with 10lb Berkley Fireline and I was using an E-Grell S10 rod matched to a 3500HD Daiwa Certate loaded with 35lb Daiwa PE braid. Each outfit was leadered up with either 40lb or 60lb to avoid some of the bust offs in the reef and at the business end we used the recently released Nitro saltwater series jigheads between 1/4oz and 1oz.

First drops

After catching a few dozen barra early on the first morning we headed to a reef in 30-40 feet that Josh had had some reasonable success on with clients fishing bait. We set up the drift, and rigged our outfits with 1/2oz jigheads and various coloured 7” Gulp! Jerkshads. Josh was the first away with a serious fish doing a bit of reef hugging before succumbing to the pressure. What popped up was not what we expected. A massive fingermark (golden snapper, large scale sea perch) drifted into view and was neatly netted. That fish measured just over 80cm and had us whooping and hollering like a group of school girls over the latest teen idol.

Next drift I was away and into a solid fish. Josh called it for something other than a fingermark, I just knew it was pulling bloody hard! After some solid work a massive big black spot parrot fish popped to the surface. Josh tells me these fish are extremely rare on lures, but this fish had no hesitation in nailing the 7” Gulp! Jerkshad jigged around its lair.

The next drift a 10kg estuary cod decided it liked the Gulp! too, making it three species in three drifts. After the initial flurry we had to settle for catching some average fingermark (around 50-60cm) for the next few hours as we reef hopped back to Weipa with the tide and wind.

The next day we headed out a bit wider and found the water far dirtier than in close. After 15 minutes of unproductive bottom bouncing in 60-90 feet we headed in to find the cleaner water and when we found it we were straight back into the fish. Fingermark, cod and trevally all swarmed over the Gulp! offerings and we had non-stop action on three different reef pinnacles for five hours. It was easily the best reef bashing with plastics I have ever experienced with someone hooked up almost constantly and triple and quadruple hook ups not uncommon!

We headed in just after lunch pretty tired and ecstatic with the results and vowing to do more of the same tomorrow.The next day as we were heading to a different patch of reef, Josh pulled up on a shallow reef that pushed the current up into eddies and swirls that just looked like trevally city. We tied on some poppers and that’s when the fun really started. Trevally of three species found the poppers irresistible and some were massive things up around the 100lb mark. One trevally (estimated at 80lb) that Josh hooked dragged us over the reef and into clean water before wearing through the leader. As we were about to go back to the reef, we noticed a thick mass of fish on the sounder. Off went the popper and on went the plastics and into the trevally we went. We didn’t move for the next two hours and someone on the boat was always hooked up during that period.This is when the most amazing capture of the trip occurred with Adam hooking a big GT on a 7” Gulp! Jerkshad and his Tactic rod (which he was testing). About an hour later up popped 70lb of angry GT. Now that’s a good capture on 10lb braid and a 3-5kg Berkley Tactic rod. Needless to say we were pretty impressed by the angling and the tackle.

The next day we did much the same but in the mid-morning we decided to try and get some black jew. As we headed onto the pinnacle we dropped the plastics over the side and I was immediately onto something big and powerful. Josh called it for a jew straight away. I had no idea what it was again but was hoping like hell it was a jew as I’d never caught a black jew before. After 10 minutes of hard fighting a big silver streak angled up from under the boat and we lip gaffed a 109cm black jew on the first drop. It took a camo coloured 7” Gulp! Jerkshad and was the first of 7 we landed that day! All the jew were taken on Gulp! Jerkshads in 5” and 7” and the four that found home… well we will never know how big they were.

Summing up at the end of the trip we all caught some sensational personal best or firsts. We landed fingermark to 86cm, black jew to 109cm, barra to 115cm, cod to 25lb, GTs up to 70lb, various other trevally species up to 30lb and some other reefy odds and sods.

If you want to get amongst some big fish up north, make sure you grab some of the Gulp! Jerkshads. 5” or 7” it doesn’t really matter because the fish just love them. Couple them with some of the new saltwater Nitro jigheads and match it to a Tactic rod and you’ve got a pretty good all round outfit to take up north. Sure some extraordinarily large fish will brick you, but you will catch more than you loose and you’ll have an absolute blast.

Just remember… as the saying goes Gulp! Fish Eat It. And that they certainly do.

Stephen Booth, Managing Editor, Fishing Monthly Group. This article appears courtesy of The Fishing Monthly Group.