Summer time off the Sunny Coast is an awesome time to be a fisherman. As the winter species shut up shop, a whole new set of fish become active.
It’s also a good time to try something new. If you haven’t sussed out soft plastics fishing yet, we would recommend it. There are a load of companies making hundreds of different lures in a variety of colours and shapes, so we get it, it can be daunting. But here’s a few tips to making your entry into the soft plastics game an easy one.
Rule one – pick a soft plastic and jig head to suit the species and body of water you are wanting to tackle. A perfect example of this is Snapper fishing. There are dozens of Snapper spots all up and down the coast, each with varying depths. Take the patches of reef a few mile out form Mooloolaba, they sit around that 20 metres in depth. So you would want to pick a jig head that weighs enough to gently and naturally float its way down. If you pick a weight that’s too heavy, the plastic will plummet straight to the bottom. Remember, the aim of a soft plastic is to mimic the look and action of a bait fish, so a plummeting bait doesn’t look natural at all.
When it comes to lure size, as always, we want to match the hatch. If you can see the size of the bait your target fish are feeding on, try to replicate that, if not, a nice generic size for offshore would be a 5inch plastic, and inshore start around the 2.5 to 3 inch size.
Then we come to the contentious part… colour. Ask any fisherman and they will give you their opinion on lure colour. ZMan make a huge variety of colours, from the natural whites, greys, and pinks, to lures with a little more fleck and sparkle. It should come down to you as to the colour you want to use. Or even grab a couple of different ones, that way if one colour works better than the others, you have a point of reference.
So head into your local BCF to check out the huge range of ZMan plastics, as well as other brands and jig head sizes.
