Bluespot Flathead

Weedless techniques in tough locations

Lubin Pfeiffer

The technique of fishing weedless hooks with soft plastic lures has been a revelation for me. My first experience of fishing with weedless came during a trip to Queensland a few years ago. Big Barra was the target but at the famous lake Proserpine where it is very weedy around the edges, a weedless style bait was the only way to work the water efficiently. There are a couple of ways you’ll find barra at Proserpine. The most fun way is to search the many weed beds for fish sunning themselves and then cast unweighted plastics at them. Without a weedless style hook, you would simply grab the weed before a fish has even had a chance to see it. The other common way to catch a barra there is to set up on a point and fish the moon or tide times. One of the best places to do this is Point Proserpine which is where a huge weedy point juts out to the middle of the lake and fish will cruise past the end of it on their way to somewhere else in the lake. Not only is the point itself weedy, but there are also lots of weed towers dotted around the end of the point. Because you are usually fishing in the low light or dark, the easiest way we found to navigate the weed towers was with a weedless hook which almost always made it back to the boat weed free. I find it very interesting that an aggressively feeding fish can be so fussy to a lure that may only have a small strand of weed on there, but as they say, they don’t get big by being stupid! Fishing some of our waters in southern Australia, weedless design hooks have been very handy as well for a few fish but none more than fishing for blue spot flathead. The fact that you can fish right in the shallow weed line and pop your plastic out onto the sand has been a game changer.

Why go weedless?

Fishing for me is all about percentages. Weedless design hooks are always going to be less effective in actually hooking the fish than a standard style j-hook jig head. The area where weedless design hooks excel is the fact that your lure is swimming in the zone more often, therefore creating more chances and catching more fish than a standard-style jig head. If every one of your casts is weeded up it doesn’t matter how well the hook will penetrate the fish because it’s simply never fishing for long enough to be of benefit.

Getting the weight correct

There is a couple of different options to weight your plastic while fishing with a weedless hook. There are weedless hooks that have lead moulded onto the shank of the hook and others that have the weight as a free swinging attachment that connects to the eye of the hook. The former is what I prefer simply because it gives you great flexibility with your setup. For example, for fishing for blue spot flathead I’ll have some 1/8, 1/6 and 1/4oz heads with a couple of packs of 2/0 and 3/0 hooks. I can then mix and match hook and weight size depending on the water, the lure I’m using and how the fish are eating it on the day. When the weight is moulded to the hook you are stuck with that hook size and weight.

You’re an Angler, and no matter how many times you go fishing you’ll want to go again and no matter how many fish you catch (or nearly catch) it will never be enough.

There will be days when the fishing is better than one’s most optimistic forecast, others when it is far worse. Either is a gain over just staying home. You’re hooked, along with us.

WE ARE TONIC!

Rigging

Without a doubt, the most important part of fishing weedless style hooks with soft plastics is to get them rigged correctly. Rigging correctly will have the lure swimming perfectly and the hook finding its mark when a fish eats it. Using plastics such as Zman (which have huge amounts of stretch) is beneficial with weedless as they will last a lot longer than other less stretchy baits.

Starting at the front of the plastic you only want to pin it lightly through the nose of the plastic and then out the bottom of the bait. Thread the hook dead centre through the nose of the plastic and then push the hook out the bottom about three millimetres from the nose toward the back of the bait. While this may only seem to be lightly hooked, the design of the weedless hook and the fact the plastic is so stretchy will hold it perfectly in place, even after the fish have eaten it many times. As you move the plastic on the hook you’ll need to flip it upright and get the nose over the little lead keeper at the front before you can thread the point of the hook through the middle of the plastic. This is the important bit as you want the plastic to be perfectly straight and not deformed in any way by being stretched from incorrect hook placement.

Try to pin the hook dead centre through the slot and out the top of the plastic, doing a rough measure with the hook before inserting makes this easier. As the hook point makes it out the top of the plastic it should sit nice and snug in the top groove. Getting this right will see the bait swimming beautifully and the hook point covered so that it can move through the cover freely.

Open to change

I find it very easy to get stuck in a particular method that may have had some success in the past which finds you constantly returning to that because that’s all you know. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to travel heaps with my fishing and it is amazing the different things you pick up along the way. It is often these things that change your fishing forever. I remember the first time I fished for blue spots after returning from up north and used the weedless hooks along the beach I’d fished previously with a standard-style hook.

Gone were the doubts of whether that style of weedless hook would even hook a fish as I just finished catching a hundred barra on them so confidence was high. I distinctly remember casting into places I previously thought were off-limits as it just resulted in a snag or a hook full of weed. Shortly after a big bluespot nailed the bait out of a gnarly bit of shallow rock at the edge of the beach. As the beautiful fish slid

A selection of weedless baits up onto the beach, I vowed never to fish a conventional hook for them again, weedless just made it so easy!