Topwater Techniques for Kingfish

Way back in my past life as a bass fisher in the UK, I was quite the expert angler. I knew every lure and how to work it to best advantage. Sadly, I realised that these skills do not adapt very well to kingfish. How I wish they did! Bass were fun to catch on light gear – 11ft rods with 5kg line – but kingies are altogether in a different league. They’re bigger, faster, and way, way stronger.

I was hooked for life the moment I witnessed my first pack attack and got dragged across the rocks by a 14 kg freight train. It was a bruising encounter. The fish fell to a stickbait which was lobbed into the fray as a school of kingfish hammered some panicked mullet. With bait leaping, kingfish boiling and water churning, it was no wonder they were grabbing at anything that moved.

Much of the time the fish we saw were busting up in workups on the surface, and you simply cast your lure toward the melee. Some days the workups stay high, but on this day they were fairly intermittent, popping up here and there around us

Despite that early success, I have had little luck on the stick-baits since then. My go-to technique for kingfish has been live-baits, but it’s hard to beat the adrenaline rush of a top-water strike. I definitely haven’t put enough time into honing my lure skills, so I figured I needed a day of intensive learning from a master of the game – that person being Roy Pulvers, of “Fish n Dips” fishing charters. There are 1001 fishing charters in New Zealand, and a fair few that focus on kingfish trips, but how many do you know that specialise in topwater trips? Not many, I bet!

The boat is a tackle junkies dream. Roy has numerous set-ups for popper casting and mechanical jigging, plus various other sets for soft-baiting and slow-jigging. It’s all on hand depending upon what the customers want to fish for and what the skipper comes across on the day.

Roy has been casting stickbaits to kingfish since this style of angling was first introduced to New Zealand and, as a full-time professional charter skipper who is working topwater lures for hours every week, he has a deeper knowledge base than most. What’s more, I found him to be very generous with his knowledge and more than happy to share advice on what I should do to improve my chances of success. It turns out my line was too heavy, and my hooks too light, but as he offers his anglers full use of his own tackle, I could have switched up had I wished to.

Sharks were a massive problem on the day. Especially so when taken on the knife jigs deeper down. Often within 5 or 6 seconds of hook-up, the bronzies where onto them and tearing them to pieces. 

From our 6am arrival at the first mark, it was a relentless day of cast and retrieve. Varying the speed, pausing the lures, and swinging the rod to achieve an effective action were all part of the learning process. The single hardest element seemed to be inciting the bite. Often the fish would follow the lure, but invariably they would just shadow it to the boat then casually peel away at the last minute. Roy assured me that on many days, when the bite was hot, the fish would be rabid for the lures, and hooking up was not the challenge it was today. It could have been the full moon, it could have been the recent cyclone, it could have been the volcanic eruption just days prior, but, for whatever reason, the fish were just not ready to commit. It was frustrating but addictive at the same time. As your lure trailed back toward you, there would often be one, sometimes two, and occasionally even more kingfish shadowing it. At one mark, we encountered schools of eight or 10 fish chasing up behind the stick-baits. It was incredible to see and set the pulse racing. There were sporadic bursts of action, especially in the afternoon when things really started to heat up. We had motored to a new mark, closer to the coromandel, and large schools of fish were breaching the surface. Here the fish were far nimbler – chasing the lures hard – and we finally got a taste of some aggressive strikes.

This was almost the last photo my drone took. Shortly after this image was taken, it entered a critical low-battery warning, and I couldn’t bring it close enough to the vessel to catch it. The skipper advised me that he’d had the same problem last week, and that I should take a swipe at it with the landing net. I was initially hesitant, but it was better that than a crash landing in the drink. As it turned out, the net was the perfect tool. Amazing the things you learn as a charter skipper!

It was encouraging to see Roy return almost every fish to the ocean. While the daily catch limit is three, he instigates a one kingfish limit per angler on his boat. And, let’s be honest, even one decent kingfish is a whole lotta fish!

May 2022 - Alex Wallace
New Zealand Fishing News Magazine.
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