Hooked on fishing: Flasher-rigs can boost your deepwater catch

By GEOFF THOMAS

Deepwater fishing can be excellent at this time of year when the weather allows longer trips offshore. Tarakihi can be found around 60m, and hapuku and bass on reefs and pinnacles 100m or deeper.

While they can be tempted with baits - shellfish for soft-mouthed tarakihi and live baits or long strips for hapuku - pre-rigged traces adorned with colourful saltwater flies, known as flasher-rigs, can be very successful.

The advantage of such rigs is that they have been designed for a particular quarry, from snapper to tarakihi, gurnard to hapuku. Hooks and colour combinations vary in size and style. The lures can be enhanced by adding a strip of bait for smell.

All traces require a sinker tied on the bottom, or in some situations a jig, which adds even more attraction.

The flasher-rig fad started with the appearance of Japanese okan sabiki jig flies several years ago. Designed for catching baitfish and now widely used for this purpose, the fine mono line and tiny, needle-sharp hooks adorned with scraps of plastic or dried fish skin certainly attract the mackerel and sprats that can be used live or freshly dead for larger fish.

The original sabiki rig, a metre-long fine line with about a dozen short traces carrying flies, is easily tangled, particularly when four or five wriggling fish are on at once. The tiny hooks also slide into fingers and clothes so easily that some anglers cut off every second trace, reducing the risks.

Another trick is to add a fragment of bait to the sabiki hooks to sweeten them and provide smell. The rigs are fished with a small weight or jig on the bottom, and are jigged up and down to keep the flies moving.

When seeking school snapper, which are common at this time of year as they congregate before spawning, a jig will often be more productive than a bait. The fish may not be feeding actively, and may attack a jig but ignore other offerings. This rig can be fished by leaving the rod in a holder and relying on the movement of the boat in the swells or waves to impart the necessary action to the flies and jig. Then a second rod can be fished with conventional rigs and baits.

People are often astounded at the variety of fish that will take such lures, from bottom-dwelling gurnard, blue cod and tarakihi to midwater trevally or kahawai.

Anglers try to improve their chances by painting lures or bending them into different shapes - in spite of the fact that the manufacturers have probably invested serious money in researching and developing them in the first place.

So it is with the flasher-rigs. Some South Islanders have been known to cut the flies off and re-tie them on regular traces, using them like traditional hooks for bait.

"When rigging a whole pilchard with two bright red flies it looks as if the pichard is bleeding, and we certainly catch fish on them," says one Kaikoura angler.

In those waters the catch is more likely to be blue cod, hapuku, kahawai, warehou and bluenose than the snapper sought by North Island anglers.

The flasher-rig can be adapted to traditional bait-fishing techniques, and one Tauranga fly-tier has come up with a system for straylining with flasher-type flies. Bill MacBrayne, who makes his own flasher-rigs, experiments with different combinations.

His rig for straylining consists of a fly tied on a strong hook at the end of a trace, with a second hook above which can be moved to vary the distance between the two. This allows the angler to use different baits, from whole fish such as pilchards to cut baits or strips. The secret is in the method of tying the movable fly with the lure actually incorporating the trace. It can be moved, but will also stay firmly in place.

The flies are usually red or orange, simulating the colour of commonly used berley. Other flies incorporate luminous material for deep water. .

The advantage of flashers over regular rigs is that once the bait has been stripped, the fly can still hook fish, particularly when it is being retrieved for rebaiting.