Hi guys,

gearing up in anticipation for the arrival summer kings (not here yet I checked on Sunday).

I've been tying a leftys loop with knot sleeve up till now, but I'm looking for some system to quickly change lures in the heat of action. Do any of you gurus have an opinion on an easy quick lure change system?

The obvious two are split rings or a coastlock swivel.

Any info on how they affect lure action, or is it suck it and see. I found split rings tended to swim baits tilted off-centre, and I'm a bit nervous about the robustness of the coastlock swivels.

Thanks in advance.   

Hey mate, on the boat I keep it simple with a uni knot direct to the lure, on most lures this will not affect the action and in my experience a uni knot will stand up to punishment if tied correct, plus you can tie this about as fast as it takes to find your S/R pliers and undo the split ring to change lures.     

The way I see it is that a coastlock swivel is designed to open when you push on the 'spring'. If the spring contacts the fish as it is swimming away (quite likely) it has a good chance of opening the clip and an even better chance of it not closing back on itself. Once the clip is open it will either bend or a devcent headshake will through the lure.

Thanks for the good oil, back to the humble uni it is. Cheers

Interesting sideline, segador, do you notice that when you use the solid to split ring combo you find you get caught up on the belly hook more often when casting?
This may not happen on larger lures perhaps, but my standard islands casting rig is to use a genie clip (although now I prefer the Berkley ones) tied to my trace. I just clip lures from one lure to the next, very easy and way more solid and secure than coast locks.
Anyhow....using smaller lures like five inch or less poppers and small stick baits....up in the tropics the small wide glides from r2c are frikken lethal, I had put on a split and a solid on all my lures, makes changing the clips way easier, and I too think it gives the lures a freer action, but I found that a lot of the casts had the belly hook catching up on the clip or the trace in the cast, especially on cup face poppers, but also on the wide glides. Really annoying.
But, by clipping directly on to the eye of the lure, this stopped happening almost entirely.
Easy to do on a lure like the wide glide where the lure eye is exposed, however, on poppers, the cupped face means you cannot easily get a clip in to the eye....so there now I have to cut and uniknot each time.
I am going to get a pile of new smaller decoy split rings and solid rings today and more in a couple of weeks, hopefully smaller metal bits may stop the belly hooks from being such a pain in the bum.
Anyhow....sorry for the digression.