Maximising your Downrigger Catches
Lots of downrigger owners pleased with results! Here’s Ben Hurrell last week:
Nothing new about that. Generous downrigger owners have been sending in pics for years. From Evans Head:
Renee, fishing with David Lord:
Derek with a quality Spaniard:
Always grateful for this feedback, which I post to our Facebook page. Are you following our page? Not big noting but there’s 83,000 people there now. Usually post up 4 or 5 reports a day, a lot of them live from on the water. And you don’t have to have a Facebook account to view the page. Check this out:
But what I wanted to mention to downrigger owners is three new ways to use your downrigger which will boost your catch results. The first one is electric deep dropping. I don’t follow a lot of fishing Youtube channels, simply because I’m so busy. But there’s one bloke whose videos I never miss and that is Sammy Hitzke, on the Gold Coast. He’s converting one of our downriggers into a super deep drop outfit. CLICK IMAGE FOR VIDEO:
I don’t think he’s tested it yet? But I can’t wait for the video, when he does. Here’s Sammy’s latest video, where he’s using one of our snap on Head Start garfish rigs. From 13:20:
Closer to home and I was lucky enough to get on the water both Wednesday and Saturday of last week. Short time runs both days, only a couple of hours to spare. So on both days the target was kingfish, at the South and North Heads of Sydney Harbour:
The problem was there weren’t any kingfish there. The sounder showed relaxed, loose bait schools – relaxed, because there weren’t any kings around. When the kings are on station these bait schools show as a tight red defensive ball and you can spot the kings hanging off the sides:
What to do? Think laterally, of course. Even if the kings were thin on the ground there could be something else around at this time of year. Bonito, hammerhead sharks, even small black marlin a possibility. Instead of attaching a lead weight with a live bait swimming behind, I ran one of our spreader bars fifteen metres off the stern. The squids look just like a frightened school trying to escape:
Five metres behind the spreader we set one of our little black poppers, chugging and splashing and looking like Tail End Charlie trying to catch up. When I ran this set up over my favourite pinnacle in fifteen metres, a small king slammed it:
But the biggest king we caught was only 60cm. With things as quiet as they have been, we will take any strike we can get. A deep diving minnow running parallel with the spreader picked up a couple of bonito:
Saturday. Quick morning run with son Chris. We set up the same plan but replaced the popper with a garfish on a Head Start:
Bonito Alley along South Head was even deader than Wednesday! But the deep diver, once again, saved us from a fishless morning:
Confident that the spreader bar shook things up both days. And I know – from comments posted on FB – that a lot of blokes struck out completely. Last but certainly not least, something we haven’t tried for a while. Fishing for snapper using a downrigger. No, you don’t slow troll a live bait around in the usual way. What you do is, use an anchor or your electric outboard to hold yourself up current of some reef that’s likely to hold snapper. Then you load up your burley cage with cut bait, drop it down to the bottom, and wind it up a metre or so:
What happens when you’re burleying from the burley pot or cubing, in a current? If there’s much of a run, your burley might not get to the bottom until it’s a hundred metres away. That’s if it even gets to the bottom! Because pests like sweep, tiny snapper, and even taylor are happy to rise in the water column and eat it all up. with the burley can, your burley is already at the level where the target fish are operating. Pickers and pests can’t scoff it down because it’s protected by the cage. Are you using pilchards or oily flesh? Because the oil is lighter than water. Water pressure will drive the oil out of your burley and up through the water column generating an invisible curtain from top to bottom. Give it a try? I’m using a metal mesh can from BCF which seems to work well. Hoping this is helpful and thanks for reading
Andrew Hestelow
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