Fishing – Snap up the snapper

What a great time of the year this is. Fishing is going off as snapper are everywhere to be found. The days are longer with daylight saving and we are six weeks away from Christmas! Now is a good time to fish deeper – around the 40 metre plus depth. This is where snapper are congregating to spawn. They are easy pickings as they school up in large numbers and are normally aggressive on the bite. The current craze is to use Kabura-style sliders, but some of you may have realised that Inchiku jigs work just as well. Because the demand is now for sliders, the price for Inchiku jigs has come down, making it a good time to grab some.

There are not so many reports of kawhai being caught but there are still some nice-sized kingfish around. Yours truly just happened to bag one of these on the weekend using an Inchigu slow jig out wide while targeting snapper. It was great fun on a light rod and a small screaming reel. The exciting thing about fishing light is that you never know if you are going to land the big fish, so the adrenalin rush goes on for way, way longer. I encourage everyone to get out now, as soon the December holidays will bring about hundreds of boats and, of course, it becomes quite hard to fish.

Continuing our series on fishing line products, let me explain the product known as fluorocarbon in this issue. There are basically three different combinations of this product.

A 100 per cent pure fluorocarbon, a blended fluorocarbon and polymer, and a co-polymer that is only coated with fluorocarbon. The question you should ask yourself is, “Why do I want to use it?” If your answer is that you want your bait to present more realistically then there is good cause to only use 100 per cent pure fluorocarbon. The reason is that pure fluorocarbon matches the light refractivity of water, hence it appears invisible in water. All other versions cannot refract light and are purely there to offer a cheap alternative. The best raw materials come from Japan and, as expensive as the genuine product is, every Japanese commercial fishing outfit uses fluorocarbon trace. They insist that it produces better catches. The downside of the product is its bad memory and stiffness. Then again, there are brands that produce reasonably supple fluorocarbon. They are great to use and do improve your hook-ups!

Anthony Roberts, Tackle & Outdoors
tecnisportnz@gmail.com