Artifical Intelligence - Lures for all seasons - Part 1

Artifical Intelligence - Lures for all seasons

Autumn kahawai are full of fight. This one grabbed a soft-bait near Tiri’ Island.

In prime condition in the build-up to spawning, kahawai are ideal for smoking in autumn. Carl Scott with a prime specimen near Whangaparaoa.

John dory are a welcome catch in Autumn – or any other time. Marty Bowers with a fat change-of-light fish on a white Jerk Shad.

Soft-plastics fished slowly along the channel edges accounted for a number of autumn john dory.

As the weather and waters cool, snapper have finished spawning and are working hard to rebuild their condition in preparation for winter, making for great lure fishing action. Photo: Mark Kitteridge

Chartreuse is a good colour for low-light conditions, and highly active grub tails fire up sluggish winter snapper. A very fat winter pannie from Auckland’s Rangitoto Channel; not huge, but a perfect table-fish.

Winter is a great time to target gurnard in Auckland’s west coast harbours. Gulp Peeler Crabs fished on a ledger rig are effective.

Black Magic Snapper Snatchers sweetened with a little strip of skipjack are another great gurnard catcher; a lure/bait hybrid.

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Artifical Intelligence

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I love fishing with lures. And although I have no problems using bait when appropriate, I get more of a kick out of fooling the fish into taking artificials.

The use of lures tends to involve active hunting – casting, jigging, blooping, trying to figure out where the fish are holding, how and on what they are feeding, and taking the game to them with appropriate technique and tackle.
Lure fishing keeps you thinking and learning about fish and fishing, and greatly reduces the mess (and subsequent clean up). There is no bait to keep refrigerated, and the lost time and hassles spent catching and keeping livebaits are avoided.
There are times when bait fishing may be more effective. Examples are when wind and sea conditions make drift fishing too difficult or having to modify your technique to fit in with other anglers who may wish to anchor and bait fish. Even so, with the wide range of lure fishing techniques available now, I feel entirely confident that I can leave the bait behind, have a lot of fun and still come home with a feed in the chillybin.
Starting last autumn, let me take you through some of the highlights of a year’s fishing with artificials.

Autumn
I enjoy autumn. The hottest of the weather is gone, and with it the mozzies, wasps and blowflies, leaving a man to fillet his catch in peace. As the days shorten, fish become a bit more urgent in their feeding, packing on condition to see them through the winter months or, with some species, in preparation for spawning.
Kahawai are such a species, and over the last few seasons anglers in the Hauraki Gulf have enjoyed access to decent schools of big, well-conditioned kahawai that were hammering the plentiful anchovies and pilchards in many parts of the inner gulf. They represented the first reasonable numbers of adult kahawai in the region since 1988, when purse-seiners nearly completely destroyed the kahawai populations there.

During this spring and summer, traditional fish movements have been about a month later than usual, so let us hope the big kahawai return again this autumn, even if they run a bit late.
They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and we certainly missed the kahawai. Besides being a good smoking fish and a reasonable eater when suitably prepared in other fashions, kahawai are a great sport fish and readily caught on lures. Their name, roughly translated, means ‘strong in the water’ and they certainly live up to it on a light spin or fly rod, jumping like crazy and hauling heaps of string.

Probably the most efficient way to catch them is to find a school (usually marked by feeding birds) and cast a small metal jig to it on a light spin rod. Angle your rod tip down to keep the lure in the water and wind as fast as you can. It’s as simple as that. Baby poppers can be a lot of fun too, and very effective. The key is to use a lure that roughly matches the size of the baitfish the kahawai are feeding on. If you can cast a fly, a school of willing kahawai and a 7-8 weight fly rod will provide wonderful sport.

Snapper, too, often hammer the bait schools at this time of year, and are the mainstay table fish in my local waters of the Hauraki Gulf. Having finished spawning, they are often pigging out on a wide range of food sources before the majority head off into deeper offshore waters for the winter. Favoured targets are the same inshore schools of anchovies and pilchards that the kahawai like.

People often talk about snapper moving along after bait schools, picking up the ‘drift-down’ of scraps from other predators, but I am pretty sure that they attack the bottoms of the bait schools in their own right. Snapper can also be found bottom feeding along the inshore channels, such as the Rangitoto, Motuihe and Tiri.
Last autumn we had regular success fishing under working birds and along the bottoms and edges of the channels using soft-baits, with the Gulp! 5-inch Jerk Shads being the favoured tail.
The bait schools often attract other predators, such as kingfish and trevally, too. We also caught john dory regularly on slowly fished soft-baits along the channel edges at this time, often as a by-catch when targeting snapper. Although not great fighters, dory are top table fish and always welcome in the bin.

Winter
As winter kicks in, the inshore waters cool and the numbers of school fish in open country thin out. It becomes a bit harder to catch a feed of fish and the weather becomes worse on average, making it more difficult to find a suitable day to get out fishing. But not impossible. Besides those occasional crisp, glass-calm winter weekends, being able to invoke the ‘ten-knot clause’ and get out fishing whenever conditions were suitable allowed the successful exploitation of weather windows of even a few hours duration. Often these entailed dawn starts to get a reasonable amount of fishing time in, as the wind regularly starts to pick up about midday.

The good news about winter fishing is that many other boaties and anglers have hung up their rods for the winter, cutting down the noisy boat traffic, wakes and competition for a park at the ramp. Don’t laugh – in a region with a population as high as Auckland’s, these can be factors in your enjoyment of the day.
And with shorter days, first and last light come at more reasonable hours, so if you fish the change of light (and you really need to for regular winter success), you don’t have to lever yourself out of a warm bed quite so early, or end up filleting and cleaning up late at night, as you do in summer. It is easier to keep your catch cool, too.
In winter, the flies may have gone, but all the snapper have not. A percentage of them tuck up in the heavy cover in shallow water. They can be hard to tempt with bait and berley, as the cold water slows their metabolisms and they don’t need a lot of food. But their predatory instincts mean they will often have a snap at a passing soft-bait, and these tend to be bigger fish than the summer schoolies.
Use light (10-12g), slow-sinking lure heads, as you may only be fishing in 2-4m of water and need maximum presentation time. Fish the rocks and weed; you will be surprised how shallow and close in the fish can be.

Lighter heads help reduce snagging, but you will still snag often. Fortunately, lead-heads ride point up and it is usually the head (rather than the hook) that jams in the weeds. Give a good firm rip and the lure will often tip up and come free. (A trick to reduce snagging is to rig with a worm hook and skim the tip of the hook back under the surface of the soft-bait.)
There were still snapper to be caught along the edges of the faster flowing channels last winter, too. With fish not as aggressive on the take as in the warmer months, the then-new 5” Gulp! Crazy Legs and grub-type tails proved their worth. With much more action in the tail at slower speeds, they proved more tempting to sluggish fish than a standard Jerk Shad, the lower retrieve speed also giving the fish more time to decide to bite.

This last winter, another productive fishing option was trying the west coast Manukau or the Kaipara Harbours for the gurnard that are plentiful in these areas at this time. Lures have a part to play here, too. In these high-current harbours, the best fishing tends to be over the top of the tide, and the bite is often all over in an hour and a half or so. By then you have your catch or have missed out.

In these often-murky harbours, scent plays an important part in attracting fish, and because the short fishing period means all your eggs are in one basket, I often fish a lure-bait hybrid system to maximise my chances. I put a berley bomb on the bottom and use two rods. One has a Black Magic Snapper Snatcher sweetened with a little strip of skipjack, the other a two-hook ledger rig with lumo beads and Gulp! Peeler Crabs on light circle hooks. This mix has never failed to produce a good catch of tasty mid-winter ‘carrots’ – all the more appreciated at a time of year when a feed of fresh fish can be hard to come by.

Next month Sam covers some interesting results with new lures during spring and summer.

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