Finding your own Spot X

“Ten percent of the fishermen catch ninety percent of the fish” – it is a well known phrase that rings pretty true. There are a number of factors that makes the ‘ten percenters’ that more successful – tackle, techniques and bait all contribute, but there is one factor that has a greater influence on fishing success than anything – the place where you fish.

Fishing in a spot loaded with hungry fish will make up for much of what might be lacking in angling skills, tackle and techniques. For that reason, the ninety percent of fishers would love to know the secret spots where the top ten percent go fishing. But once a good spot is revealed it gets hammered and thus it’s no longer a good spot…. the trick is to find your own secret ‘spot X.’

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Location, location, location

There are many habitats that are known to produce fish and most of the popular channels, worm beds and reefs that have a good number of fish are well known. These spots are generally structures that are marked on a chart, pointed out in map guides and written about in books and magazines. Out on the water, these spots are often marked by the presence of dozens of boats. Sure, these spots produce fish or there wouldn’t be a lot of boats fishing there, but locations with a lot of fishing pressure have fewer resident big fish.

Lots of boats don’t always mean lots of fish – fishermen can be like sheep. If two boats are fishing in close proximity, the skipper of a third boat sees them and thinks, ‘that must be a good spot’ and drops the anchor near by. A fourth boat comes a long and the skipper thinks, ‘there are three boats there, it must be a really good spot’. Before you know it, there are ten boats fishing one spot and quite often, none of them are catching anything. The point here is that it is not the spot that makes the difference, it is knowledge of what to look for when deciding where to fish.

What to look for

Areas with good habitat, natural food supply and not too much fishing pressure are what we are ultimately looking for.

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Good habitat might be a shallow kelp bed with a good supply of kina and shellfish, a pinnacle with a holding plenty of baitfish, or deep foul with crabs and crustaceans. The habitats or structures marked on a chart are generally well thrashed, but you have to start somewhere.

So, start with a chart, and rather than going straight to a wellknown reef or submerged rock, go to the general area and use your sounder to scan the surrounding area for rocks or foul that might hold fish.

When charts are drawn up, it’s not practical for the survey vessels to locate every little rock, hump or bump on the sea floor. Therefore, there is a lot of good structure not marked on the charts. It’s these unmarked spots that can really produce the goods.

Use your electronics

I have a GPS loaded with spots in a variety of depths and locations, suitable for differing conditions, tides and times of the year, but when I head out, the spot I want to fish most, is somewhere I’ve never fished before. I like to explore areas, learn about the fishing in a location and build up my fishing options. To do this, I head for an area that will be suitable for the conditions and I keep my eye on the sounder for any foul, rocks or baitfish sign on the sounder. If something likely pops up on screen it’s simply a matter of hitting ‘mark’ on the GPS, then once I’m satisfied I’ve scanned the area sufficiently, I’ll anchor up on the marks or set up a drift over the area.

If it fires – great! I’ve found a new spot. If not, I still save the marks to try another day and I’ll go to one of my proven spots stored in the GPS. I treat my proven spots as an insurance policy when the fishing is hard rather than places to continually hammer.

A good deal of the spots in my GPS have been found while traveling from A to B over a seemingly featureless area. The ultimate spot is an uncharted reef or rock in the middle of a wide flat area. These areas act as a haven for baitfish and they are an oasis for the larger fish like snapper, kingfish and hapuku. For this reason, always keep one eye on the sounder when traveling or trolling over the wide-open flats.

The proof is in the pudding

The best way to illustrate the how good the fishing can be, is to highlight a case where I’ve stumbled across some unmarked foul. When I first put a GPS on my trailer boat, I was doing about 25knots on my way out to Great Barrier Island in the dark. I happened to glance down at the sounder to see a series of small spikes (rocks show up as spikes at high speed) I didn’t even slow down, I just hit mark and continued on.

After a rather dismal couple of days fishing at Barrier, I took a look at the mark on the way home. Just along the snail trail past the mark, a reefy bottom slowly rumbled up from 41 metres to 36 metres and a large blob of fish showed up mid water. I idled the boat over the mark and instructed my mate to throw out a jig.

About five seconds later he said “it’s hit the bottom already” but it wasn’t the bottom, rather it was the first of 16 kingfish we tagged and released that afternoon, along with half a dozen snapper in the 8-20lb range. That spot still holds kingfish and snapper and because it’s off the beaten track, I always had it to myself. Since then, I always watch the sounder while traveling or trolling, because you can never have too many secret ‘spot Xs’.

   This article is reproduced with permission of   
New Zealand Fishing News

June 2018 - Matt Watson
Re-publishing elsewhere is prohibited

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