IF you like fishing for bream, bass and whiting on surface lures then the Night Walker Nano is the latest offering from the Halco stable to add to the list of your available topwater options.
At 36mm long and 3.5grams the Nano falls into the light or ultralight category and is a surface walking lure, meaning that it’s a floating lure which waddles from side-to-side when retrieved at low speed.
The interesting thing about the Nano is it can also be popped along the surface. While the lure isn’t a traditional popper, I was playing around with retrieve styles and after a while found that a subtle twitch of the rod tip caused the lure to pop along the surface, imitating a fleeing prawn or wounded baitfish.
An overcast morning when the bream were chasing prawns over the flats in Sydney Harbour was an ideal scenario to test the Halco against a conventional popper. I alternated between the Night Walker Nano and the popper, managing five fat fish in total (three on the Nano) plus a number of wild missed strikes before my electric motor packed it in and I was no longer able to glide over the flats.
I found the most productive retrieve on bream was to twitch the rod tip a few times causing the lure to bloop, then a slow draw with the rod tip or crank of the handle to waddle the lure, then pause for a second before repeating the process again. As with most little topwater lures, if you pop the lure too hard it will spin and tumble, occasionally fouling the trebles. Removing the front treble helped reduce the risk of fouling and added a subtle amount of additional action without impacting hook up rates significantly.
Once you get the action correct the lure bloops along nicely and waddles along the surface enticingly.
The hooks are light gauge and sticky sharp, the biggest bream of the morning bent the trebles out of shape with those crushingly powerful jaws. No surprise there as big oyster cracking bream crunch little trebles so I normally carry a few spare sets in my lure bag.
With a number of trips under its belt now, the Halco Night Walker Nano has proven itself as a capable topwater lure for bream and sits in my tackle box alongside other effective lures when chasing bream and bass on the surface.
Contact: Halco on (08) 9430 5080; www.halcotackle.com
