Hooked On Angling/Noosa Blue Water Charters - Soft Plastics Onwater Seminar!!!

I am always eager to help out when tackle stores are proactive about assisting anglers to improve knowledge and skill levels. A few months ago, I was impressed to learn that my local Hooked On Angling store in Tewantin had organised a local charter boat to be available to anglers interested in learning about catching offshore species on soft plastics. Store proprietor Ed Vander Kruk asked me if I wanted to tag along to share my learning’s so as to provide an “On-water Seminar” approach to the day – which I was only too happy to do. Gun local skipper Tony Webber of Noosa Blue Water Charters was happy to take the crew out for a full day session so we had some great local experience on board!
We finally got the weather to behave for us and an eager crew were ready to go at 5am on a Saturday morning. Tony’s "Cougar One" has a couple of 300’s on the back so we steamed 20 odd miles offshore with very little fuss and time lost.

We spent the first few hours fishing and discussing the rigging of soft plastics, outfits, lines and jigheads used when targeting fish offshore. The bite times weren’t predicted until the middle of the day so we had a few quiet hours to discuss some of the finer points of soft plastics fishing before the fish started to chew.

A happy Skipper with crew hooked up!

Tony moved us around for the first couple of hours until the sounder started looking very lively. Dropping a mixture of 7 and 6 inch gulps on ½ Oz to 1 OZ jigheads in 70 metres of water we suddenly had chaos on board with 4 or 5 rods all hooked up at once. The fishing proved reasonably consistent for the rest of the afternoon with most spots producing fish. 7 inch jerkshads and 6 inch gulp grubs in mainly bright colours seemed to be producing a majority of the fish caught. It was great to see a few anglers catch their first fish on soft plastics and start to develop some confidence that these things “actually do” catch fish very well! You gotta love dropping plastics on the reef!!!
The current fluctuated a lot through the day and the fish were hugging the bottom fairly tightly which meant that the crew were changing jighead weights quite frequently. It was a good lesson for the day – how important it is to get the jighead weight heavy enough to just get you down to the fish – without having too much weight and producing an unrealistic presentation. It did not take all anglers on board long to get the feel of drifting plastics down to deep fish and developing the patience to give a fish time to play with a plastic and eat it properly. I think one of the skills in plastics fishing for reef fish is in getting lures to sink slowly enough down to the fish, learning to working at keeping a lure in the strike zone (current is often pushing lures back up) and learning to allow fish to play with a lure before mouthing it and loading the rod with weight before striking. One of the best ways to teach people these skills is to do it on the water – where it can be talked through and then experienced. We had a smart bunch on board because they all picked it up very quickly and all caught fish …. all except Ed who bought his banana jinx with him as usual!
One of the highlights for the day was having some pelagic action thrown into the equation. A couple of dolphin fish ate 7 inch jerkshads and played a lot of aerial tactics before one got off and the other was landed.

At one stage a small black marlin cruised past the back of the boat before departing the scene. It was interesting to hear Tony and crew had a black marlin hooked on a 6 inch Gulp grub a few weeks ago. The fish eventually popped a fairly light leader but was a lot of fun for the angler before this happened!
Having caught a good bag of fish – we headed for home and I had the chance to speak with Tony on the way. He mentioned how much the soft plastics approach has improved his catch rates on the charter. He predominantly fishes 7 and 5 inch jerkshads and mentioned that on days where a mixture of baits and plastics were used, the plastics have often saved the day. Fishing much of my time these days with both baits and plastics, my opinion of why this is the case, is that I believe soft plastic lures make it easier to provide realistic presentations to fish. One of the aspects I really like about plastics being used on a charter boat is that many customers get the chance to tangle with some good fish. A real bonus to the approach is that very few juvenile fish are caught when fishing plastics. The baited paternoster rig accounts for many juvenile species on charter boats that often don’t survive after being cranked up 50 to 70 metres and then released. Soft plastics greatly reduces the mortality rates of these juvenile fish which has to be a good thing. The gear used to fish the plastics is much lighter than some of the outfits used to fish paternoster rigs, which means anglers get to very much enjoy the battle when playing plastics caught fish. It was impressive to see a charter boat skipper very driven on providing a great service, where anglers get given a good chance to catch fish and enjoy the experience at the same time.
Ultimately the day was a great success. All anglers caught fish and I think they all learned enough to have them catching some good fish on their own – which at the end of the day was a major goal of the trip. It was a lot of fun on my behalf fishing with a great bunch of anglers and learning a lot from them and the crew of Cougar One.

With results like these you'll have to get in fast for the next trip...

Ed has lined me and Tony up to help out on another trip planned for early next year – so if you are up this way and keen to go or are touring up this way early next year and want to go, feel free to call Hooked On Angling in Tewantin (07 5449 7541) and get your name on the list – but be quick as the last trip booked out in record time!

Happy Fishing,
Nige