When shallow just isn’t shallow enough! skinny water. POT HOLING AND CHANNEL BASHING As in the property market, this tactic is all about location, location, location. There are kilometres of flats to fish in the Classic’s arena, and truth be told, there are probably flathead on all of them, however this tactic required a few simple pieces to come together. On any given flat there will be areas where the weed clumps and is not
BRISBANE
Steven Booth
I’m lucky that I get to hang around really good anglers most of the time and this gives me the opportunity to learn new ways of doing old things and that is exciting. Last month I got a late call up to fish the Gold Coast Flathead Classic with gun flatty anglers Troy and Darren Dixon. To say I was keen to hit the local waters I’d fished for years with such talent was an understatement. I know Dicko (Troy) does things vastly different from how I fish my local waters for flatties and that had me excited! His brother Darren also fishes similarly to Troy and seeing two good anglers go about their work, both fishing the same areas made it even better.
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JANUARY 2022
3/8oz (10g) jighead and whipping the rod hard. To see how Dicko and Darren shook and jiggled their lightly weighted paddletailed plastics was a real eye-opener. Sure we’d used paddle-tails plenty of times, but there is nothing quite like seeing it first hand to work out where you’re deficiencies are. To achieve the results in amongst the weed that was often littered with snot weed, the boys fish very light jigheads. 7g was
Elephants eat peanuts. The Fat Betty coloured 3.5” Flat Shad tempted this beautiful 79cm flathead from 60cm of weedy water.
Bright colours have always been willingly chomped by flathead and the chocolate rose coloured Flat Shad was Darren’s best lure for the comp. The fact we were fishing a competition meant little to me at the time, I was just pumped to be fishing with some really talented anglers knowing I would be doing things I’d never done before! SHALLOW We’ve all fished shallow for flathead over the years. Angler guns, like David Green, have preached about big fish in less than a metre of water for years and the swim/ glidebait and surface luring for mega-flathead has taken shallow to a new level, often as shallow as 0.5m. The difference with the tactics I’m going to discuss is that we were working on the elephants eat peanuts theory, where you are finesse fishing to 2-7kg fish with lightly weighted
The other advantage of clump weed is that it tends to create draining channels. Now these channels are not like the amazing snake drains you see in tropical barra creeks, they are simply slightly deeper (often as little as 10cm) sandy runs between the weed clumps. If the weed is particularly vibrant, and depending on wind and current, the weed can literally overhang the deeper channel creating a perfect undercut that any
paddle-tailed plastics! Over the course of the competition, we fished in water from 30cm out to a maximum of 1.6m and landed 85 flathead in the three days. We didn’t troll a single metre as it’s challenging to troll with a 200hp outboard and 21ft bass boat, and spent the entire competition casting various soft plastic lures into skinny water filled with weed and fish! Looking back on the statistics from our three days, more than 90% of our fish came from less than a metre of water, with the three biggest fish (and another two beasts we dropped) all hooked in less than 70cm of water. That’s getting really skinny, in fact so skinny that we were locked in over the low tide on the final day and had no choice but to catch oversized fish in ultra-
The snot weed on the leader speaks volumes about how careful you need to be fishing the shallows. If this is all over your lure, you’re not fishing! Light head weights and a meticulous approach are needed to minimise snot weed interfering with your catch rates. simply a vast weedy flat or a featureless sand flat. This clumpy weed is the areas you are looking for as it provides a range of targets to cast at from the one boat position. By definition, the clumpy weed means there will be patchy sand and mud areas, and these cleaner areas provide the perfect casting target and the perfect ambush areas for big flathead.
good trout angler would recognise as a hot spot! In my mind I can see a flatty with its nose and eyes sitting out of the weed
the heaviest we fished all comp, but the majority of the time we fished 5g and 3g jigheads on either 3.5” Zerek Flat Shads
GEAR FOR THE JOB Lures Zerek 3.5” Flat Shad 4” McArthy Paddle Tail PML Flathead Jigheads 5g, 7g 3.5g jigheads Rods Blade N Tails 6’10” 6-12lb spin RLFBT18 Blade N Tails 6’10” 4-8lb spin RLFBT17 Reels ATC Virtuous Carbon Fibre 2000 ATC Virtuous Carbon Fibre 800 Line 6-8lb braid 10lb, 12lb, 14lb Wilson FC leader
On the last day, the ‘unskilled labour’ (the author) fished a Bone Focus 130 glidebait in the same areas with great results. As in everything, there is always more than one way to skin a cat!
clump, or buried beside the weed edge just waiting for a baitfish or crustacean to come too close. By the time the bait realises the danger, it’s way too late. If you can make your lure be that unsuspecting bait, well it’s game on! LIGHTEN UP OLD MATE The biggest lesson for me was the entire finesse approach. I’m more familiar fishing a jerkbait-style plastic on a
or 4” McArthy paddle tail plastics. The beauty of the lighter jighead is that the plastic doesn’t plummet into the weed or the mud. It’s not really a slow fall either, but the lighter jighead certainly allows you to manage your lure around the weed with ultimate confidence. A typical cast would see the angler targeting a sandy patch or a channel at full casting distance and really concentrating on where
