Hooked on fishing: Use the currents to boost catches

By GEOFF THOMAS

The snapper is an obliging sort of fish, turning up in large numbers just when we are thinking about closing up for the annual summer break.

Whether fishing from a boat or from the shore, the holidaying angler usually has little trouble catching a meal of fresh fish.

While surfcasting from beaches in Bay of Plenty and Northland has been producing good catches recently, it is the boatie who bags the most.

Around Auckland, the fish have been steadily moving into the shallow water and into the Waitemata Harbour, with the Rangitoto channel proving the more consistent of the popular channels.

Snapper like a current, and the stronger the current the better the fishing. But when the tides are large ones, peaking at about 3.4 metres on the Waitemata, the resulting powerful rips and currents can make it difficult to get baits to the bottom.

Some successful Auckland anglers prefer a long trace of several metres, which allows the bait to move around, but this method can also cause difficulties in detecting strikes.

The alternative is to use either a short trace below a sinker, or a ledger rig with the sinker at the bottom.

For inexperienced anglers, the ledger rig is more effective, because the hooks are between the rod and the sinker and the rig is more sensitive, providing a definite advantage when the fish are only mouthing the bait, as often happens during the phase of the full moon. The bite is transmitted as just a slight vibration on the line, and can be difficult to detect.

In this situation it helps to keep the reel in freespool after dropping the baits to the bottom, and then continue to slowly pay out line, allowing the baits to move across the bottom with the current.

This technique has two advantages. It ensures the baits stay hard on the seabed and it keeps them moving. Whereas if you put the reel in gear and hold the line, the powerful current will lift the weight and baits off the bottom.

If line is paid out when a bite is felt, and the reel slipped into gear and the rod pointed at the water until the line comes up tight, then lifted sharply to set the hook, the hook-up rate will be much higher.

It is often surprising how large the fish turns out to be when the initial bite appeared to feel like a tiddler. By pointing the rod directly at the water so there is no angle between the line and the rod tip, the bites can be more effectively detected with just finger pressure on the line by the reel.

Another technique that will yield results when the snapper are proving fickle and hard to hook is to keep letting out line slowly for a few metres while on the bottom, and then slowly winding it back in.

The moving baits seem to be more attractive to tentative fish, and a surprising number can be hooked like this when other people are sitting waiting for a bite and catching nothing.

The favourite bait for this type of fishing is a combination of a square piece of squid and a chunk of pilchard. The small, white, eating-quality squid imported from California are gobbled up by the snapper in preference to the darker, orange variety. A pilchard can be sliced into three chunk baits after the head and tail sections have been discarded.

When the fish are really on the bite the pilchard can be dispensed with, and half a squid on each of two hooks on a ledger rig will do just as well.

But usually a period of fishing with the pilchard chunks is required first to bring the fish on the bite. Perhaps it is the juices and guts from the pilchards which encourage the snapper to start biting, for they certainly prefer the gut section of a whole pilchard bait.

When rigging whole baits, one hook should always be inserted directly through the stomach just behind the gills, as this is where the first bite will be made.

Such fishing is very much a matter of experience and feel, and the angler who is prepared to adapt to different situations and try different rigs and techniques will always bring home the most fish.

Recent experience also supports one of the theories associated with the lunar or Maori fishing calendar, which suggests that on a rising moon the outgoing tide fishes better, and conversely the incoming tide is best on a falling moon.