New Gulp! 'chooks'

Tackle Test

Left, top to bottom: Cajun, Sweet ???n??? Sour, Satay and Curried Chickens. Right, all that the fish left of the BBQ Chicken supply.

Aussie visitor Adam Royter scores a nice Hauraki Gulf pannie on the new Cajun Chicken colour.

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Probably the best-known (and, consequently, the best-selling) soft-bait colour scheme is Berkley’s Gulp! ‘Nuclear Chicken’.

Whoever came up with the outlandish name was a genius. People remember it and ask for it.

Consequently there are more of them around, so they get used more and catch more fish – so people buy more of them – positive reinforcement at work.

The colour scheme has been so successful that many other manufacturers have been pressured into coming out with their own versions of blended green and red.

Often, it doesn’t matter too much what colour you use – size and action can be more important – but there are days when certain colours do seem to make a difference. For example, those with a ‘glow in the dark’ capacity certainly produce the goods in low-light situations, and brightly-coloured lures often work best when water is discoloured.

Now Berkley has come out with a new range of colours under the ‘chicken’ banner. I had seen one or two of them as prototypes, but my first chance to fish with them came in mid-May.

Malcolm Dawson, Manager of Pure Fishing (the distributors of Berkley Gulp!), had invited Aussie Adam Royter, part of the Berkley promotional team from across the Ditch, to come and help out with soft-bait seminars at the Auckland Boat Show. A couple of days prior to the show’s opening, I had a day out with the team on the Hauraki Gulf, aboard the Brett Rathe-skippered charterboat Assassin.

Adam had brought a good supply of the new colours with him: various ‘chickens’ all sporting two blended colours, like the original. Satay Chicken is yellow and brown; Cajun Chicken is pink and black; Sweet ‘n’ Sour Chicken is brown and white; Curried Chicken is yellow and red; BBQ Chicken orange and clear; while Tandoori Chicken is red and white. Tandoori was the only one that Adam did not have with him, but the others all looked pretty good to me.

I guess success is a relative thing. On previous soft-plastics trips on Assassin we had made catches of well over a 100 snapper (plus other mixed species) for the day, just keeping a few for a feed. This day was a bit slower for reds – we only managed about 80 – but we did drive away from schools of 2-3kg snapper in an effort to find better fish. Big kahawai were constantly in action too, intercepting lures before they could get down to the snapper, and there were other species as well. Most would call it a pretty good day.

All of the new ‘chooks’ proved their worth, with my two favourite fowls being the Satay and the Curried Chickens – but mainly because I liked the look of them, so used them first. As I mentioned, we had no Tandoori Chicken aboard that day, and I never got a chance to try the orange and clear BBQ Chicken either, as the entire supply had been chewed up by fish the day before! These new chooks from Berkley look likely to give their famous ancestor a bit of a run for its money.

Satay, Cujun and Sweet ‘n’ Sour are only available from Hunting & Fishing stores, while Curried, BBQ and Tandoori will be available through all other Berkley stockists.

Story by Sam Mossman.

- © Fairfax NZ News