FISHING plastics for snapper has boomed in popularity over the past five or so years. You’d have to have been living under a rock not to realise that reds are now a legitimate lure target. But it seems that softies aren’t the only lures that snapper eat. Before the plastics boom, there was always the odd report of snapper being caught on lures. I remember one that was taken by well-known NSW South Coast spinman Dave Mayne on a metal while casting at schools of striped tuna off the famous Tubes in Jervis Bay. A pic of that fish, a two or three kilo pannie, as I recall, featured in a 1980s copy of Fisho.
I used to surf and fish with Dave’s sons, Gordon and Mark, and I was always intrigued by that fish. Back then everyone knew that the only way to catch snapper was to use bait. So why did that reddie eat a metal lure cast at surface feeding fish? Even back then I think switched-on fishos were open to the idea of snapper being a lure target but the technology as far as lures and tackle probably restricted what could be done.
Like many anglers, I fully embraced the whole snapper on plastics thing when it happened and over the past few years have caught some cracker fish on plastics of all types everywhere from southeast Queensland along the NSW coast to Victoria and down to the snapper heartland of South Australia. After gaining some experience with this fishery, and thinking about how snapper feed and what they feed on, I began to understand why plastics – especially jerk bait styles – worked so well. Matched to the right jighead, a quality plastic looks just like a dead or dying baitfish fluttering down the water column. While at times plastics were almost ridiculously effective, especially in a few locations I’ve fished in northern NSW and down in SA, I often wondered if the snapper I was catching would respond to other lures.
A chance conversation with Michael Starkey at a tackle show a couple of years back revealed that they certainly do. Michael, a well known tournament angler who with his father Paul runs Frogleys Offshore, the Ballina-based tackle company which distributes Fuji, Gamakatsu, Megabass and Atomic products, told me he’d been donging the reds in his local waters on Megabass lipless crankbaits, specifically the Vibration-X Ultra (a 76mm model available in a range of colours and in either rattling or silent modes) and the more compact Vibration-X Smatra, a 64.5mm lure with an ultra realistic presentation. Megabass has just released a new lure, the Lipless Bait, which comes in at 80mm and half an ounce in weight.
While lipless crankbaits have been around for years, I’d always considered these lures to be pretty much exclusively used for bass. After talking with Michael I was keen to find out more about them as an option when snapper fishing.
It took a year or two of organising but I finally made it up to Ballina, along with good buddies Riley Tolmay and Dan Burgess, to spend a bit of on-water time with Michael and Paul. A couple of sessions fishing the reef systems out from Ballina revealed some interesting developments in the whole catching snapper on artificials story.
The technique the Starkeys employ is not dissimilar to that used when plasticking. Basically you need to find suitable ground – reef edges with fringing gravel beds, drop-off and bommies – and present the lure in a way that appeals to the predatory instincts of the snapper.
My experience with reds is that while they obviously feed on crustaceans and other bait items in and around the reef, they also keep an eye out for any food items coming down from above. Like bream will shadow tailor schools in an estuary, waiting for any scraps or chewed up baitfish to float down to them, snapper probably do the same in a reef environment. This is more than likely why snapper often hit plastics on the drop.
Look at the basic profile of a lipless crankbait like the Megabass Vibration-X models or similar patterns like Rapala’s Clackin’ Rap or the Sebile Flatt Shad, and you’ll note that they are designed to sink horizontally with a slight downward bias at the head. This, to my way of thinking anyway, is not that far removed from the action of a slow falling plastic. Weighted with the optimum jighead, a jerk shad should sink pretty much horizontally with the head section, which is weighed down by the jighead, providing momentum and, depending on the shape of the head, even a bit of subtle action.
Both lure styles are highly realistic with the lipless crankbaits having the added bonus of reflective colours and noise in the form of rattles. There’s no doubt that these lures work on snapper. Michael comprehensively outfished the rest of us with his Megabass Vibration-Xs, garnering a respectable bag of pannie snapper which were later barbequed to perfection for dinner that night.
As with snapper on plastics, the gun retrieve seemed to be of the “do nothing” variety, although I did note that Michael employed a few rips, twitches and pauses in the mix. You want the lure to “suspend” as much as possible in the mid-water bite zone. Too high up and the reds might fail to spot it, too close to the reef and you’ll risk snagging up, which is not something you want to see happen to expensive Japanese lures …
While not exactly sporting, sticking the rod in the holder and just letting the movement of the boat give the lure some action was a really effective technique, Michael said.
As well as distributing the Megabass ra1nge in the local market, Michael Starkey has used his extensive fishing experience to come up with a few nifty lure designs of his own. When we travelled to Ballina back in 2010 the Atomic Semi-Hardz was in the final stages of testing. Now released on the market, this unique sinking stickbait incorporates a soft rubber body over a hard internal frame. It’s got that horizontal sinking characteristic that I reckon snapper love and is well worth experimenting with. Available in various translucent colours, it very effectively mimics the size and profile of a baitfish slowly sinking through the water column.
Although Michael Starkey was the first fisho I personally came across who’d had real success casting hard-bodies for reds, other anglers have also been experimenting with different types of lures for snapper. My mate Wes Murphy last season enjoyed some spectacular results using TT blades and Rapala Clackin’ Raps for snapper out from a remote South Coast location he and I often fish over summer.
Wesbo retro-fitted his lures with Gamakatsu Inline Singles to reduce snags and also get a better hook-up. I’ve noticed myself that trebles, even heavy-duty ones, seem to crush quite easily in a big snapper’s hard mouth. A few 20lb+ reds caught on lipless crankbaits during a memorable session out of SA’s Arno Bay a few years back saw these massive fish absolutely destroy the lures and turn the trebles they were fitted with into tangled messes of wire. This damage issue is probably something that’s going to limit the effective use of this style of lure on really big reds.
There’s no doubt the fish eat the lures – the problem is that they smash and wreck them. This is OK if you’re talking a softie that costs less than a buck, but it takes on a whole new meaning when you’re talking about hard-bods that cost upwards of $30!
NSW Central Coast based “Captain” Mark Phillips has also been fiddling around with different lures for snapper in recent years. One of the early innovators of the snapper on plastic scene, Captain freely admits that he was getting a bit jaded with softies.
“I’m the type of guy who tends to get a little bored doing the same old stuff,” he says, “so recently I decided to leave the soft plastics in the tackle box and try some different styles of lures to target snapper.”
Even before he started fishing for snapper with plastics, Captain, a long-time Fisho writer, enjoyed “patchy” success on reds by slow trolling bibbed minnows such as the Rapala CD series. “I knew that trolling bibbed minnows worked but what I was after were sinking lures that I could cast and thoroughly fish the water column from top to bottom.”
French lure maker Patrick Sebile’s innovative and unique lures really appealed to Captain. He particularly likes the Flatt Shad, a lipless crankbait style with a narrow head and a flared belly section. This design, according to Captain, “allows the Flatt Shad to fall through the water column bolt up right with a subtle shimmy”.
“Flatt Shads will sink all the way to the bottom like this but will quite often get eaten long before they get there,” Captain says. “Once the lure’s reached the bottom I’ve found it’s simply a matter of varying a smooth one or two hop retrieve until I get a bite. Water column flexibility and the fact you can fish it vertically without the lure tumbling and fouling the leader up makes the Flatt Shad a very versatile lure.”
Fisho’s SA Correspondent, Jamie Crawford, is lucky to live in snapper heartland and he gets the opportunity to try a heap of different lures out on snapper ranging from pan-sized “ruggers” to some of the biggest reds you’re likely to encounter.
Relatively deep water and some pretty strong currents in Jamie’s home waters often mean it’s difficult to fish plastics effectively. Jamie’s enjoyed a fair deal of success with blades and also metal jigs in recent years.
“We’ve used a variety of blades and vibes over our snapper grounds, and they have proven to be a gun lure over shallow to medium depth reefs,” Jamie says. “Although these lures look funky, their best feature is their action, not their appearance. Even in deeper water of around 20m, when using braid you can feel the tight vibrations extending up to the rod tip. We have had some days where the fish had gone shy towards SPs, we knew the fish were still holding on the reef so we switched to blades and triggered a second bite.”
Experimentation has revealed that blades are best used during periods of slower tidal movement in grounds ranging from six to 20m “Most of the blades we use are in the 10 to 14g weight range, but we’ll drop back to six to eight grams over the shallower grounds. There are some great blades available; but finding a model suited to depths of 20m and sturdy enough to cop punishment from a solid red has been a problem in the past. The blades we have been using recently have been TT’s Switchblade 1/2 and 3/8oz, the Ecogear VX50 and Tiemco’s Metal Sonic 50 and 60.”
Jamie recommends upgrading trebles on all blades and says that the metal blades tend to withstand more damage than plastic-bodied lipless crankbaits.
Fishing a blade for reds is pretty simple, according to Jamie. “Make a cast away from the boat, let the lure sink to the bottom and then begin a steady lift, drop and recover style retrieve. Make sure the retrieve speed is quick enough to make the lure work (feeling vibrations), and remember to keep the blade down deep in the zone.”
A key tip is to fish blades at anchor – Jamie feels they don’t sink quickly enough to make them an option when drifting, especially in deepish water.
Although more popular for kings and samson fish, it seems that in the right circumstances metal jigs are actually quite effective on snapper.
According to Jamie, these lures come into their own in deeper water in the 20-30m depth range. “Jigs are a good option when it is rough and when the tide is racing, when in this situation many other lures struggle to reach the bottom. “They aren’t the kind of lure I’d drop to scout an area; instead, they’re effective when a school of fish has been identified near the bottom. In this scenario we’d motor up-current or up-wind of the sounding, and would drift back over the school working our metal jigs.”
The jigs Jamie’s talking about here aren’t the 200g+ metals used when jigging big kings “ but 40 to 60g slim-profile metal jigs that represent fleeing baitfish about the length of a whitebait or frogmouth pilchard”.
Good options Jamie recommends include the Butterfly jigs from Shimano, Sea Rocks from River2Sea and the Sure Jig from Surecatch.The upshot here is that snapper are a true sportfish. Once considered a bait-only option, the rise of soft plastics has demonstrated that this popular and widespread species is more than partial to a well-presented lure. Work in recent years done by innovative anglers such as Michael Starkey and the other guys mentioned in this article, and no doubt plenty more switched-on fishos around the country, reveal that the snapper on lures story is only just unfolding. Stay tuned to Fisho for more exciting developments!
