Hi Evil

Personally,

I find the crabs ( last weekend anyway) drifted  in 45- 60 M out at Great Barrier were wolfed down. Worms as well. No fancy rigging , I just stuck them on like I would have any other piece of Bait. The worms were threaded straight onto a hook .I fished them  alongside other conventional baits, like  pillies , Jack macs  and Mullets  and I would say the worms  out fished them all. Enticing  a  far more  aggressive bite , even when the fish were  "sucking" the bait, during the traditionally quieter periods of the day.

Barrie , the crabs  very closely resembled  crabs the snapper I was catching , all in the  8-12 lb range , were regurgitating onto the cockpit floor. So it was a case of "match the hatch".

One  Sp "bait" I rigged as a joke , was  half a crab ( remains of what was left ) and the remains of a worm which had also been  chewed previously.Total bottom time before it was  swallowed by a 8 lber , was probably 40 seconds. The conclusion I came to was  it was the  movement of the worm on the drift that was  exciting the snapper.

Evil, Soft Plastics work in 2 ways: 1) by mimicing and imitating a maimed baitfish or whatever. And 2) by tasting like the real thing in the case of the better ones or at least enough to fool the fish. Plastic often still tastes like plastic which is especially true of some that use no attractant in which case they largely work by mimicry and fooling the fish. Certainly true of the older ones which used just plain plastisol and some of the older dreadful plastics..That is why livies are still the best bait going, they cover it both ways. Bait is often just dead meat once it has been left in the water and the scent and taste has been washed out. There has been a lot of work and research on S/Ps over the last 10 to 15 years and a lot of improvements as a result. The better ones can now out perform bait. It has taken a long time and a lot of experimentation trials and testing to get there though. The lakes and coasts of America are littered with millions of  poor quality baits that have been and are mostly non dissolveable and non biodegradeable. In the last 5 to 10 years or so there has been some big changes. There has been a lot of research and development and some vast improvements as a result.

To do well with S/Ps at this depth you have to fool the fish by one method or another. You can do it by mimicry, the addition of berley which can get around the scent issue and prepare the fish to strike, or by making the S/P taste like the real thing. Note it is not scent that is the most important here but taste. I know Berkley and all these others make a big song and dance about Scent but Taste is far more important. Scent is how they find or locate their prey with the most sensitive fish being able to smell 1 part in millions but believe me Taste is far more important. If they don�t get caught by striking and they pick the bait up and taste it and it tastes like crap they will most often spit it out after a few seconds and not have another go which means with poor S/Ps they generally only have 1 go. If its got an attractant and its reasonable they will have another and ifs it got a good attractant and its taste pretty good they will have a number of goes and generally end up getting caught. For the last 3 months or so I have been working on this problem for around 12 hours + a day for 7 days a week and I am almost there as regards a formula. Its taken a bit of time tracking down one or two of the ingredients I require but shortly I hope it will be on the market. We will see. I have done this before and last time I got round it by using krill which I imported specially just for the job. It certainly works darn well but I ended up with a darn expensive product. This time around I am being more exacting and seeing if I can do a better job cheaper.

I suggest you use a 3 M trace and a small ball sinker hard up against the hook with a snap coupling at the end which joins the line. You can put another sinker just in front of that if you need to use more weight. That should at least slow the spinning down. 

Red, You got it right about movement.