DAIWA FISHING TIPS: What’s working? by Ian Seeto

It doesn’t matter where your fishing or what your fishing for, the tides, moons, baits, lures can ultimately determine your success. Like all things though, it takes experience to understand which stars are aligning, something that often takes anglers years of fishing.

In this article I thought I’d share my recent findings when lure fishing in the creeks and estuaries, hopefully it might take the guess work out for a few anglers.

As a rule the hard body lure has always been my go to, the first thing I’ll tie on or cast. Whether it’s cranking them down the banks, across flats or on the face of structure they generally have produced for me even during the tougher sessions. What I’ve found up here in recent months is that when it comes to hard body lures, my success is very limited with most the fish coming while trolling the lure down the main channel when moving from spot to spot and the occasional fish coming from rocky structure.

Soft plastics on the other hand seem to be the winner of the lures in the last few months. Before you think it is the finesse approach that is enticing the fish, it is actually the opposite. Aggressive, fast retrieves seem to be what the fish are after and despite my efforts to rip and jerk my hard body lures in an aggressive manner, they still haven’t delivered the same success.

With the nasty structure that inhabits my local creeks, namely lay downs and mangroves, my presentation of plastics is almost always rigged weedless. That is with the hook buried in the soft plastic so that it doesn’t get snagged as easily. In other experiences I’ve found this presentation less successful because sometimes it is hard to get the hooks to set. Thankfully of late, the hook set is the least of my worries. With the aggression and vigour that the fish have been striking, my focus has been more on extraction from the mangroves before the cheeky fish are back up in the maze of roots.

Now that I have written this, my next outing is bound to change everything I currently know but the important thing to remember is to be flexible and know when to try somewhere different or a new or different technique.