I’m often asked by people what I think is the most important part of the big-game equation.
Most people assume that I will automatically reply, “The lure,” being a producer of artificial baits. But it’s only recently that I have assumed the mantle of lure-maker, having been a fisherman and boatie almost all my life before I even met a marlin.
Long before spooling my first Penn reel, I was ensuring that success never started merely with what was on the hook, and what once assumed importance with small brown trout at the age of six still applies today when chasing 1000lb (450kg) blue marlin in deep, azure-blue water.
Preparation is the key to success (“If I had nine hours to cut a tree down, I would spend six hours sharpening my axe,” is the saying, I believe). Luck is a valuable asset too, but buying a new lure because someone caught a big fish on it last week will not ensure you automatic success the next time you venture out. Instead, let’s divide the marlin game into the percentages as I see them, after many thousands of hours at the helm.
Preparing the boat so all the mechanicals work correctly, ensuring that the fuel is clean and that the boat will do what is asked of it during the course of fighting a fish, are necessary and important parts of the equation. Many huge fish are lost during the fight because someone, somewhere, didn’t do what they should have done, rendering the boat unmanoeuvrable. Even more important is the aspect of simple safety: that the boat will get you to sea and home again, or – in the unlikely event of an emergency – that your safety gear is properly prepared, and you and your crew understand how it all works. In my percentiles, boat preparation makes up 95% of the equation, but for the purposes of this equation we’ll call it 30%.
I cannot stress enough that at the end of a day’s fishing, I really, really do want to be asleep in my own bed, not clinging to a fender in 6000 feet of water as dark falls, half way to the Kermadecs.
Tackle preparation – including fresh line, new knots, properly adjusted and drag-checked reels, sharpened hooks, correctly installed outriggers and chairs, correctly selected and set up gaffs/tag-sticks – is a natural and methodically easy part of the equation to live with. Anyone capable of reading and learning from experience has no excuse for failure in this department. Excuses will only be tolerated if the stainless pinion gear in the reel snaps, a great white shark eats your marlin, or White Island springs into life with a Krakatoa-like explosion while playing a 100kg kingie in the vicinity. Of all the percentiles, this is the one where you, the ordinary mortal who works five days a week, can actually be in control. All of this is 20% important, which may seem small, but this is the bit I expect to be right. Some of you may be able to deal with the White Island eruption too, of course…
Spatial awareness is the next bit, and by this I mean being in the right place at the right time, alert to your surroundings and aware of what is going on elsewhere, either through communication or binoculars.
Tide-tables, fish-finders, GPS units, watches and log-books all play their part. You won’t catch any fish if you don’t run them over – you have to be where they are. Luck does play a part here, which is where experience and hunches come into play. Get this part right and you’re looking good for that tag certificate or a trip to the smokehouse. Twenty-five percent and looking good value, this bit. (By the way, change your fishing mates if they like to sleep all day.)
However, none of the above will happen unless you pay attention to the next 15% of the game: getting the fish to the boat. Fighting a fish with the boat, on the rod, with the drag and reel used to their full advantage, and then actually dealing successfully with the fish alongside, are vital to an outcome.
Plenty of fish worldwide every year get cut off by the helmsman, thousands of winners are broken off on the leader, and several times more than that are lost when over-zealous anglers ramp up the drag pressure with hands and levers, breaking the mainline. With a gamefish you should not break line if your reel is working and your drag set correctly. Yes, your knot may pop, your quarry may die or even bite through the line or jump on it, but – until that hook falls out – you should stay attached to your fish. No excuses. Unless you’ve not been paying attention to the 30% of the first part of this equation…
(I can fully endorse the use of a baseball bat as a successful way to avert over-zealous fingers pushing drag-levers to full.)
Now, if you’ve done your sums, you’ll see we only have 10% of the equation to play with. Does this all go on lures? No, it doesn’t, because before we get to choose our lures, we need to think about what we’re chasing, where we’re chasing it and why. Sound weird? The spread in its entirety is more important than the individual lure – it’s worth 7.5% of the equation.
A good crew uses the pattern to do something specific: sometimes raising fish with active lures, but hooking them on easy-to-eat ones; sometimes taking hooks out of lures and using angry, violent baits to elevate fish into a frenzy, before pitching baits on selected tackle; and sometimes covering the options of hooking different species.
Matching the lures to weather and boat speed, and then emulating bait species is also part of this percentile. It’s important to get this right, because this is where the honey is – this is the ‘really fishing’ bit. All in all, this part of the equation deserves its 7.5%.
Some sensible advice here: do not run seven rods from a 5m trailer-boat in a 20-knot beam breeze.
Only 2.5% left to go. Is that all there is to go on the lures? Yes. You want to know why? Because in all sincerity there is probably nothing between any single lure when it comes to numbers of fish caught per type/brand of lure on the market.
The most successful lure in the world in terms of sales is the ubiquitous Moldcraft Wide Range. There are an awful lot of them out there being pulled around, and they catch an awful lot of fish. Take Zuker’s 5.5 – lots of them sold in New Zealand, lots of fish hooked and caught on them. Black Bart’s 1656 – not too many of them being pulled in New Zealand waters and not too many fish reported on them, either. Joe Yee’s Apollo – a few of them being towed around each year off Northland, and a few fish caught on them, too. The list could go on for hours, and you’ll see that the number of fish caught per lure relates directly to the number of lures in use. You see my point? While you may have none of the lures above in your spread, you do know they catch fish.
Instead, in your spread, you have lures you’ve caught fish on or seen others catch fish on. They all work. Bad lures do not last long in this game – no one buys them and they quietly go away, or their manufacturers stop making them for other reasons.
If one lure raises all the fish, but you can’t get a decent hook-up on it, simply remove the hooks and pitch a bait instead.
The truth is, a man new to game-fishing could go into a decent tackle store, be sold six or seven lures for striped marlin fishing by a knowledgeable salesman, and never need to buy another if he didn’t listen to other people. Those seven heads would cover just about every situation he’ll meet, the only uncertainty surrounding their selection being colour, since that is still the matter for debate in every pub.
Do colours matter? Do fish see them? Why does the black and purple Zuker 5.5 seem to work so well compared to the pink one? Why does the Pacific ‘Fruit Salad’ seem to catch more fish than a silver one? Are colours important to fish? We may find out eventually, but if colours are important to you as a fisherman, choose a lure system that lets you change your colours instantly. At least that will make you feel happy!
Visit http://www.legendlures.com/index.cfm/pageid/16 to see a range of lures that will do this job for you.
I’ll leave this part of the tale with some things to ponder. The percentages above may seem strange, but they’re not. As a species, we fishermen spend a lot of time preparing tackle, tying knots, making sure our reels work and laying out the right clothing and accoutrements. To be blunt, once the hooks and leader are put in the lures, they go in the bag and we don’t spend a lot of attention on them until they go in the water. We’ll study tide-tables, weather reports, phone people endlessly, browse on-line forums, read books and generally do a bunch of stuff rather than open the lure bag, look at them and then do it up again. They really are a small but simple part of the equation.
When your flies are rigged, your waders on, the car parked and the river stretches out before you, do you stop at the first stretch of water you come to? The knowing angler might, the idiot almost certainly will.
When that late-night caller whispers, “Behind the north-east reef in 300 metres of water at 3.35pm today, the sky was full of wheeling gannets, 19.5 degrees, and just after the tide-change we raised four – be there tomorrow!” then hangs up, are you really going to call him back and ask him if you need to pack the softheads?
Pay more attention to those who tell you ‘where and when,’ not ‘what on’. I guarantee you’ll catch more fish.
Roddy’s tips of the month:
Put a piece of clean electrical tape on the side of a reel next time you spool it up. Use a fine waterproof pen to write the date and poundage of line you’ve put on it. Every time you pick up that reel it’s a very handy reminder as to what exactly is on it and when it needs changing – especially useful for braided lines. For fixed-spool reels, write on the tape before sticking it inside the spool. Old-fashioned Dymo tape machines also work well.
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This article is reproduced with permission of
New Zealand Fishing News
Oct 2007 - by Roddy Hays
RE-PUBLISHING ELSEWHERE IS PROHIBITED |
