THERE’S nothing better than feeding your family and friends with fresh fish you’ve caught yourself. DAVID GREEN is an avid seafood consumer and in this article details proven rigs for catching some of the tastiest fish in the sea.
IN South East Queensland the winter months coincide with light winds and a decrease in the hard north to south current that runs throughout summer and autumn. Going out to sea in winter up here is generally pretty pleasant when compared to more southern climates. When it’s cool and calm most fishermen start to think about snapper, jewies and pearl perch. If you’ve spent most of your life as a hunter-gatherer of the ocean, this is the time where some real quality food fish gets put away for special occasions over coming months. No big snapper, jewie or pearlie has ever survived once brought aboard my boat!
Snapper
Over time you form opinions as to what are the best methods to catch bottom feeding species. Fishing is always about innovation and improvement. As fish get smarter, we get cleverer. When I first arrived on the Gold Coast 30 years ago there were large populations of snapper on the inshore grounds, and you could reliably catch them in the middle of the day on a rough as guts paternoster rig. The problem was, everybody did catch them. This reduced the numbers significantly, and when the Gold Coast Seaway opened in 1987 it gave big boats reliable access to the close reefs. The previous Southport Bar was shallow, often dangerous and suited smaller boats. It protected its fish populations well. After years of exploitation, snapper seemed to change. These days it is almost impossible to catch a legal snapper on a paternoster rig. The modern big snapper is an old and smart fish that takes a great deal of catching.
As the fish became more cautious, we changed the way we targeted them. Berley was always a part of snapper fishing. They have a sense of smell like a dog. As soon as small bits of tuna or pilchards start drifting over a reef, snapper are out looking and hunting for the source of the food. I remember once fishing in 35m of water. We were berleying heavily. The fishing was good, and after a while the snapper had moved from the bottom to midwater and higher. It was a glass calm day. When I stood up there were a pair of snapper pulling bits of tuna out through the holes in the berley pot.
The key to fishing a bait in a berley trail is to make it drift unimpeded so it sinks just like the rest of the berley. Ideally this is done with minimal or no lead, and it is important to remove swivels, shiny hooks and other paraphernalia from the rig. Ten kilo mono straight through to a small Octopus hook hidden in the bait works well. The line must be always slack and naturally slowly drifting and sinking. I generally fish a threadline outfit with the bail arm open and feed the line out so it never gets tight. It is a pretty neat feeling when you feel the line take off through your fingers. I let it run for five seconds or so, point the rod at the fish, close the bail arm and strike hard.
At this point you will either have a good fish give a few headshakes, or be gaining line on something smaller. Big snapper are pretty distinctive fighters. Like mulloway, they always give a distinctive headshake. A decent snapper between four and eight kilos takes a bit of stopping, and it is common to get wrapped up on the deeper wire weed and pinnacles in this part of the world.
The above technique is called floatlining (“straylining” if you are a Kiwi.). It has stood the test of time, but over the years I’ve learnt a few tricks that have helped me catch better fish. This is one type of offshore fishing where nylon monofilament seems to work better than braid. The stretch of nylon, the fact it is less visible underwater and the ease of feeding out slack line seem to work. I’ve found with braid that fish seem to drop the bait a lot. It works OK if you run a long nylon top shot, but in general my snapper and jewie outfits have 10 kilo clear nylon monofilament for offshore work using float lining methods. Small gangs of hooks work well with half or whole pilchards – the Gamakatsu Gangsters are a great hook to use for snapper. When the fish are really shy
I drop the hook size down to a 2/0 Gamakastu Octopus and fish the mono straight through to the hook with no leader. If a sinker is required it runs down onto the hook. When using a running lead I generally hold the bait in my hand and let the lead free fall while I hold the bail arm open. When the sinker has fallen deep enough so it is about 10m or more from the bait, I drop the bait in and keep feeding out line. If I hit bottom without a bite, I wind in and repeat the process. Over the years I’ve often tried to fish two rods at once while floatlining. What I’ve learnt is that one rod fished well will out fish two rods fished poorly. The secret is to always keep the line slack so the bait wafts down in the gentle current. You need to be on your spot at dawn and fish sunrise, or alternatively fish mid-afternoon into the evening. In my area snapper always bite best with an orange and low sun and a change of light.
When soft plastic snapper methods became popular the catches were quite spectacular over the first few seasons. Snapper ate a seven-inch Gulp in the exact same way they ate a pilchard. They just couldn’t get enough of them. Nearly all the bites came as the soft plastic drifted down the water column fairly passively. We didn’t get many actively jigging the lures. As well as snapper we caught kings, mackerel, tuna, mulloway, cobia and pearl perch. Off the Gold Coast a lot of the snapper fishing takes place in about 60m of water, which is considerably deeper than most waters where soft plastic methods are used. What I’ve noticed is that over the past few seasons, and they have been fairly poor snapper seasons, is that bait has out fished soft plastics by a wide margin, whereas in earlier years it was a pretty even contest between the pilchards and the plastics. Perhaps, just like the paternoster rigs of old, snapper have learnt to avoid some plastics. Just like bream in the estuaries, snapper seem to learn to avoid some of our best and most effective lures.
Pearl Pearch
On our wider reefs, a ridge of rock that marks the edge of the continental shelf in about 80m of water, the methods we use are a bit different. This rocky ridge seems to concentrate a lot of different species in a relatively small area. The fishing in this water is heavily dictated by wind and current. The ideal conditions are no wind and a trickle of current. This reef runs north and south for over 100km, but the good spots are on a narrow ridge only a few hundred metres wide. The key to fishing this spot is to control the drift so you maintain a north to south direction, rather than drift across the reef. To do this I put my GPS plot screen down to a small range and look at the rate and direction of drift. I usually find, particularly in a north-westerly, that I am constantly reversing into the current to keep me on the reef. This area, known as the “50s”, is a great area to catch pearl perch.
It also holds some big snapper and lots of unstoppable things that scream off into the rocks and bust us off. These can be amberjacks, samson fish, big kings or cod. I used to spend a fair bit of time targeting these fish and I once caught an amberjack that weighed 42 kilos on a live snapper on this reef. These days I want pearl perch or a small amberjack to eat. For some reason, big kingies just don’t appeal to me much at all these days. They pull too bloody hard and the ones from the deep reefs of southern Queensland taste like soap. There are many different rigs to try on the 50 fathom line. For a bit of exercise you can rip and tear away on a jig rod using 300 gram knife jigs targeting kings and amberjacks. We’ve caught some big pearl perch on metal jigs at times.
Micro jigging is another method that works well on both pearl perch and snapper. One of the problems of using the latest micro jigging methods in this spot is that it’s an absolute mecca for red rock cod and sergeant bakers, and these species both tend to love small metal lures wafted around their heads.
My main rig when specifically targeting pearl perch is a three hook paternoster rig fished on 60 pound braid off my jig outfit. The leader that makes up the paternoster rig is hard 60lb mono. From the top dropper is attached a gang of 3 x 4/0 Gangsters, and from the bottom two droppers I use small circle hooks. Bait is a mix of pilchards, squid and fillet baits. A small piece of lumo tubing above the gang gives better visibility of the bait in deep water. To the bottom of this rig I hitch my lead, which is generally between 200 and 400 grams, depending on current.
We use lumo sinkers for pearl perch. It is a trick used by many local charter boats and it seems to work. Pearl perch fight like an old boot but are one of the best quality eating fish available. When I see that purple and silver sheen coming into view I start to salivate! A big pearl perch is any fish over 2.5 kilos. We’ve caught quite a few over four kilos and one six kilo fish on some of the more isolated pinnacles we fish. I really feel satisfied with a few decent pearlies and snapper in the esky. The 50 fathom reef also produces quite a few black banded pig fish that are also a delicacy.
Jewfish
The next fish on the winter menu for offshore anglers is the mulloway. Over the years I’ve chased these fish throughout the estuaries right through to the offshore reefs. The key to catching offshore mulloway is to fish live baits just after dark and into the night, but you need to find a good spot. Mulloway need reefs with plenty of cover. During the day they like to hold in cracks, ravines, caves and under ledges. They are a schooling species, and often hundreds of fish will move from a cave just on dark and move into the surrounding area to feed. Once you’ve found a good mulloway spot, guard it carefully and it will keep on giving. When we target offshore mulloway we generally head out mid-afternoon. The ideal conditions are a tide change just after dark and flat sea conditions so the boat sits still on anchor.
I like to have plenty of live baits on hand. My favourite baits for offshore mulloway are slimy mackerel, tailor and pike. Yakkas are a very distant fourth. On many of my spots mulloway and teraglin tend to be on the same spots, and teraglin have a habit of killing your live baits fairly quickly. Big baits like a live legal tailor work well for jewies and avoid the teraglin. The rig we use consists of a 10 to 15 kilo overhead outfit and a large ball sinker running onto a swivel. Below this is a metre of 60lb mono joined to an 8/0 circle hook onto which a braid loop is attached. This is fished from a side mounted rod holder with the reel in gear, as the fish will generally hook themselves on the circle hook. This is a very reliable method of getting a mulloway or two. Filleted, divivided into meal size packs and frozen, jewies make great meals for weeks to come and are excellent as sea food chowder.
The above article is a rough guide to my winter food collection on the offshore grounds off the Gold Coast. I hope some of these tips help you catch a feed of these great fish. While catch & release is a great thing, winter is, for me, “kill & grill” season. And there’s few things better to eat than pearl perch, snapper and mulloway!
