Advice & Info: SoftBaits at Great Barrier

The fishing was so good ‘The Boating Guy’ had forgotten about the beer I’d opened for him an hour or so earlier. The fishing was flat out and the beer was just flat.

We were at Great Barrier on ‘The Immigrant’, an immaculately appointed Riviera 58 with Vern Hayden - the owner, Bruce McGill from Riviera, ‘The Boating Guy’ – Ian Miller and crew. With three days ahead of us everyone had been quietly hoping the weather wouldn’t live up to it’s forecast!

It was blowing 25 knots plus from the westerly quarter, but we had found reasonable shelter round the back of the Barrier and planned to target a few snapper for dinner the following evening. 

The wind had limited the options for fishing but we found a couple of likely looking spots in from Arid island and selected one of those.

After the anchor had found a rock to hold on to, there was the usual ‘Le Mans scramble’ to get baits in the water and the team were flinging a variety of tasty looking morsels at all angles from the cockpit within moments.

We had been provided a range of Berkley softbaits and some suitable rods and reels courtesy of Malcolm at Pure Fishing and Mike at Topcatch.

We had three set-ups – all running ~10lb braid with around a metre and a half of 25lb fluorocarbon topshot. The rods were graphite, light and powerful and easy to cast with the eggbeater style Abu reels. Initially there wasn’t a huge level of interest from the rest of the troops in trying these bits of scented plastic but that was about to change.

Before we’d left, Mike from Topcatch had generally explained the technique to me – fish in around structure and white water, ideally on the drift and cast forward in the drift direction.

Let the bait sink and give it a bit of gentle movement on a slow retrieve.

All pretty straightforward. ‘The Boating Guy’ and I landed our first casts in pretty close the rock we were fishing and right in the white water.

Our baits were nailed within moments and we’d a couple of smallish snapper to the boat before you could say “Pass me another Berkley Bait Boating Bloke”…. The real-bait guys looked on with definite  “who needs to be good when you’re lucky” type expressions!

And that was pretty much how it went for the three days we were there.

All the soft-bait types (sardines, imitation squid tentacles, green and red things, crabs….)  got eaten by snapper, trevs and rat kings. While some worked better than others there was not much difference between the varieties of bait. If you had to pick and choose, the Berkley ‘Gulp’ baits may have been slightly more effective than the ‘Powerbaits’ but there wasn’t much in it. Of all the baits squid tentacles were certainly deadly on the snapper.

Interestingly the softbaits out-fished (in terms of numbers caught) our primo-quality pillies and freshly caught butterflied jack macs and the usual top quality snapper faire. That was evident by the fact that one of our crew, Shane commandeered the rod I was using after the first day and it was a real mission to get it off him for the rest of the trip!

We did catch more smaller snapper than the boys on real-baits.

It appeared to be more likely to be a factor of hook size than anything as we were generally using smaller hooks.

90% or more hook-ups were in the mouth although one or two of the larger snapper we caught had just inhaled the softbait and were hooked down near the gills.

Playing fish on the lighter gear is great fun and a real added bonus. I have been fishing braid with about 8m of 8kg mono topshot for the last couple of years and the enhanced sensitivity you get with braid (while retaining a little and all-important elasticity from the mono) brings a new dimension to fishing.

The new style long, light modular graphite rods make playing even small fish fun and are, at the same time, these rods are powerful enough to tackle trophy-sized fish.

So is it cheaper to use softbaits?  This experience would suggest probably not.  If there’s a lot of small fish about you’ll get your baits chewed and munched and on some occasions we were lucky to get a fish per bait. When there were larger fish about we were averaging 3-4 fish per bait. Sure our technique could be improved and we might be able to improve that ratio but we chewed through all the baits we had been supplied and another 3 or 4 packs as well.

We didn’t get any trophy fish but caught and released dozens of fish up to about 4kg. And the biggest fish did come from a pillie and was about 4.5kg. We caught several up to almost that size on the softbaits however.

If you haven’t tried softbaits, give them a go. It’s clearly an effective form of fishing, lots of fun on the lighter gear and at the very least keep a couple of packs of softbaits in your bag for those days when you run out of ‘real-bait’.

Grant Blair May 2006