Downrigging Bass - the deadly new technique

Up to Lake St Clair in the Lower Hunter Valley, on Thursday afternoon. Mission - chasing bass:

Several clients had told me the lake was firing. Top bloke and mad keen fisho Ange Stama from Spotlock Marine shared his recommendation of the best chatterbait to use. Thanks Ange:

Such a beautiful spot, Lake St Clair. I put up the tent, launched the boat, and drove it around to our camping spot. A little local stopped by to say hello:

I was with my wife and wasn’t planning any extended sessions. First afternoon we were out for maybe two hours, mainly working the points with deep diving lures. That produced a few fish:

Next morning – Friday – planning a short run in the morning and a short run in the evening. The morning run was very slow although Caro did score this nice golden on her Scorpion:

As you can see in the pic above, the downrigger was still in the rod holder. Simply because I hadn’t bothered to take it out on leaving Sydney. But as we cruised around and saw good numbers of bass schooling up in 5 to 11 metres of water, an idea began to form. Why not try downrigging for them?

Because we hadn’t planned to go downrigging, I hadn’t brought any release clips. But I did have a trolling flasher! Which I thought would be a great attractor if run ahead of a small shallow run minnow lure - with a tight action. I tied the braid to the tail end of the attractor flashers with an overhand knot:

The results were just incredible. Here’s a 31cm:

Here’s a 34cm – with a body like a football:

Amazing results. Not big noting myself but there were 30 boats at least on the water and some blokes actually pulled up to watch what we were doing. Our best fish was 37cm. How did it work? We would downrig along the drop offs until we marked bass on the sounder. Then, double tapped for a waypoint. Big loop around and back over the mark, with the downrigger weight set to exactly the depth the fish were marking. So, bringing a small minnow with a tight wobble action right past their noses. You could never get that size lure with that tight action down to the 11 metres needed in middle of the day fishing. Some deep divers could do it but that's not what they wanted. BANG. Absolutely deadly:

I actually wasn’t sure whether to write about this in case the technique got abused. But after a day at St Clair with all the boats out and not seeing one bass taken kept it’s pretty obvious that the percentage of catch and release up there means there’s nothing to worry about. We had a ball and will be back up there soon – taking two downriggers AND SOME RELEASE CLIPS. We also forgot to take a landing net 😊 As to downriggers? Of course I’m biased but ours is the one to get. Thousands have been sold and, if you’re on our Facebook page, you’ll know that owners send in pics showing how well their downriggers are working on everything from marlin to mackerel. Now we find they’re deadly on bass too. Check them out here and thanks for reading,

DOWNRIGGERS

Andrew Hestelow

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