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Challenging Yourself — Big fish on light tackle — Matt Sherriff

CHALLENGING YOURSELF

Matt Sherriff

As I write this article, my boat has been dry for around six weeks due to everyone being placed on movement restrictions. Living in the Meander Valley municipality has ruled out any fishing activities on salt water which has meant the weekends have been reserved for gardening. As a gardener, I make a bloody good fisherman, but at least when the restrictions ease up the yard won’t need any more maintenance and I’ll be ready to go!

Seeing as there’s been no recent adventures, what better time to talk about some of the future fishing plans. This downtime has given us all some time to check over gear, watch a few fishing shows and put some thought into what our first missions will be when things start returning back to some sort of normality.

My focus will be to take a different approach to the way we target some of our more valued species in Tassie, predominately Striped Trumpeter, Blue Eye and Snapper. Jigs and Soft Plastics are something that most of us have used at some stage, but with the above-mentioned species, most are generally taken using bait. Whilst bait is reliable, and great for those that are happy to sit back and wait for a bite, those of us that like to be actively fishing will enjoy the more hands on approach needed to work soft plastics and jigs effectively. Alan Koh jigs up a blue eye

This style of fishing for Demersal (bottom feeding) species was introduced to me in Western Australia around seven years ago, where we spent a week at the Abrolhos Islands. Over this time we caught Samson Fish, Snapper, Baldchin Grouper, Coral Trout, Red Throat and Dhufish on both plastics and jigs. Fishing with lighter gear than we’d normally use, made the experience even more awesome. Some of the guys I know from WA are that hard core into jigging, they refuse to have any bait on their boats whatsoever!

What intrigued me most with this style of fishing is downsizing your gear. Don’t be fooled by the ultra-light thin rods and smaller reels, these setups are more than capable, and in most cases outperform much heavier gear whilst being notably easier to handle for extended periods.

Around 12 months ago I was showing Stuart Blackwell from Musselroe Charters one of our setups, a PE3 jig rod coupled with a 4000 reel and 20lb braid. He looked at me in disbelief when I said this outfit was more than capable of knocking over Striped Trumpeter. We set him up with one of these combos to try on the Stripeys with jigs and he was blown away by how much fun they were to catch on this gear.

Stuart specialises in charter trips focussing on Striped Trumpeter and he was that impressed with this style of fishing he is now considering running specialised charters for those that want to jig for Stripeys! To me this is the next level!!!

Up the North West coast of Tas, sponsored anglers, Mason and Daniel Paull have had considerable success on the Snapper with slow jigs, with Mason saying he’d much rather drift with jigs than be anchored up fishing bait. This style of fishing is not just a more active form of enjoyment, but it also enables you to cover much more ground when looking for fish.

Another North West angler, Glen Saltmarsh is quickly becoming known for consistently catching Snapper in the Devonport area. Whilst Glen does catch many on bait, more recently he has been having great success drifting with plastics and mentioned that they have even caught a snapper on a silver sliced lure cast into a school of mackerel (I have seen the pic). This just goes to show how enthusiastic Snapper can be for artificial lures and opens us up to a whole new way of targeting them with options outside of hooks and sinkers. Over the last few years Glen has shared a huge amount of information in regard to catching Snapper which has encouraged several other successful anglers who are more closely guarded with their information to share more openly. The result of this information has seen many more anglers have success with this emerging species in Tassie which is great for us all! For those on social media who are looking to improve their Snapper catches, Glen is definitely someone to follow.

What about Blue Eye on jigs?

The first thought that comes to the mind of most is “you’ve got to be joking”? I mean, who drops a jig that is the best part of 1kg down into depths of over 350m for fun? Anyone with a sense of adventure, that’s who!! For those that target Blue Eye using electric reels, you’ll know how hard these fish can load up a 37kg rod, just imagine one on a PE5 jigging rod!!!

A few years ago, at the Australian Fishing Trade Show, I was lucky enough to meet Alan Koh from Ocean’s Legacy. His company designs and imports specialised jigging rods, jigs and accessories. We struck up a friendship and he has since been sharing with us the success they have in WA, catching Blue Eye Trevalla and Hapuka on jigs. He was amazed that this type of fishing had not taken off for us down here with the quality of our fishery! Mason Paull with a NW Snapper.

Fishing & Boating Specialists EPIRBS

SOFT PLASTICS YETI

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