Pelagics and surface feeding go hand-in-hand but sometimes you have to dig a little deeper
to find them. Lee Brake explains.

For years the general approach to chasing pelagics in north Queensland (NQ) has been simple: look for birds, find bait balled near the surface and cast or troll lures through it. It’s not rocket science and it works, however, it’s not always reliable. In fact, there has to be pretty magical, glassed-out conditions to find bait and pelagics holding near the surface these days, especially inshore. If the chop doesn’t send them deep, then it’s likely boat traffic probably will.

When you’re working jigs in the deep you need a fairly short, fast tapered rod that can handle the inertia of a very sudden, powerful change of direction.

The Rapala Xrap that took this Spanish for Jamie Evans got down deep enough to attract the attention of a school feeding almost 30m down. Never forget that fish will rise to a lure if they can at least see it.

It’s for this reason that many anglers are starting to adapt their techniques when it comes to chasing pelagics. Rather than looking up and using binoculars to scan the surface, they are looking down. A quality depth sounder becomes your number one weapon. Anglers from Cairns, Townsville, Bowen, Mackay and all the places in between can all attest to the effectiveness of fishing deep water marks for pelagics. Wrecks, isolated bombies, prominent shoals and deep drop-offs near islands and reefs all have the potential to hold balls of bait, and with that bait comes marauding pelagics. Without a quality sounder though, you’d never know they were there. There’s no ripple on the surface or diving birds. It’s likely the only sign you’d get would be the odd snipped off rig…
I’m not just talking about the stomping grounds of the big boat brigade either. After all, the cooler months in NQ, from May through to September, tend to see high concentrations of bait push inshore and congregate within reach of your average tinnie. Deep water marks can simply be any isolated structure that the bait schools will hold around in an effort to gain some shelter as they move through an area. On a rough day this can be something as simple as a marker buoy mooring, or on a calm day it can be anything from a shoal a few miles out to a bombie in the shipping channel 50 m down.
So, as anglers, we have a challenge and an opportunity. Most anglers still see pelagics as surface feeders and prefer to fish deep water marks with bottom rigs in search of tasty reef species. This presents an opportunity as it means that often, even in pressured areas, pelagics holding in the deep can be relatively underutilised. The challenge is how do you adapt your shallow water pelagic techniques to suit the deep?

While popper fishing for GTs is popular, many people forget the effectiveness of jigging or using big baits. These are often much more productive techniques when they are shutdown.

Hit them early
Dawn is the magic hour when it comes to targeting pelagics, which means you want to be out of bed in the dark. Now this might be uncomfortable – we don’t do cold mornings well up here in the north – but it is worth it, trust me. Getting to your intended deep water mark at, or before dawn usually means you’ll be amongst the first to arrive. This can be a huge advantage in busy areas. As mentioned, many anglers like to bottom bash the deep, which means they will likely anchor right on top of the mark. If the mark is small, like a single bombie, then that pretty much destroys any chance you have of trolling or drifting.
The next big advantage is that bait will often hold on marks over night and will remain schooled up there until the sun comes up and they move on. This means that if you arrive early you have a much better chance of finding your sounder lit up like a cheap motel room under a black light. This, of course, leads to the other big advantage of dawn – fish are hungry. It’s a well-known fact that fish like breakfast, and they eat it early. You can bet that those nervous, shimmering schools of bait you are seeing on your lit up sounder will appear similarly to an ‘All You Can Eat Buffet’ sign to hungry pelagics like mackerel, tuna, trevally and cobia. However, this is a double-edged sword. Those predators blasting through schools and slicing at the vulnerable edges eventually break up the bigger schools which causes the bait to disperse. This means that your window can be short.
How to hit ‘em

This ribbonfish chin guard comes complete with a small bib to add extra action. Freespool it over a deepwater mark then slowly accelerate and hold on!

Jigging
Anyone who has read some of my past articles will know that I love jigging like little Timmy loved wells. It’s without a doubt my favourite way to target big fish down deep. The key with jigging for pelagics rather than bottom fish is speed. Remember you are trying to emulate prey, and prey flees; it doesn’t sit there and do the Harlem Shake. Whatever jig you drop, you want to be imitating a vulnerable baitfish that has become separated from the school. Such a fish will be defecating building blocks; it’ll be darting left and right and running towards the bottom in search of structure or the safety of its school. That’s the action you want to replicate and in my opinion nothing does that better than a soft plastic jerkshad.
My personal favourites are the 7” Gulp Jerkshad and the 8” Zman XL StreakZ. Both have long, streamlined profiles and are ideal for triggering an instinct bite from pelagics. I’ll usually rig them a little on the heavy side so that they really charge towards the bottom when you pause or free spool. However, you still need to make sure that when you give them those all-important rips with the rod tip they glide forward and dart from side-to-side, rather than just ‘lift and thud’ as they will if over-weighted. It can be tricky to pick, but the key is to feel the lure hit the bottom and then when you give it a rip with the rod tip there should be a noticeable period before the lure touches down once more (braid line and graphite rods help here). This will mean the lure is gliding forward and not just dropping straight back to bottom.
The technique is pretty simple. Find the bait ball on the sounder (if you can’t, keep looking or move on) and establish a drift direction using your GPS. Once you have this, line up a drift that takes you right over the mark. Deploy your jerkshads so that they are on the bottom before you reach the bait and then once down there begin quite a vigorous action. I like to employ 3 or 4 hard, fast rips and cranks of the reel to get the lure darting up and off the bottom. Watch your sounder here. You’ll see your lure most times and will be able to calculate how high it’s rising in the water column. You want to be working your lure up, along, over and down the structure, so make sure your action suits. If the bait is holding mid-water or on top of a pinnacle or bombie, then you may need to add more rips to get the lure higher in the water column. Just make sure that no matter how high you work the lure, you always free spool when you’re over the bait. Most times it’s the lure plummeting that provokes the strike, but if that doesn’t work, or the bites are not converting to hook ups, try rip-cranking (rip the lure, crank the slack, and repeat) the lure as fast as you can all the way up to the surface.
This more continuous vertical approach works well with other forms of jigging, namely knife jigging, and rather than pausing, the jig should either be rip-cranked up (yes, it’s a word now) or free spooled down. Knife jigs only look like a fleeing fish when moved at speed, so never slow your crank. In fact, where you will get away with a medium retrieval speed with a jerkshad, you will not with a knife jig. A fast jigging style baitcaster over 6.0:1 or a high speed spin reel is required.
Trolling
Now, high speed trolling is predominately a relatively shallow water technique, right? Wrong. There are a select few lures that will hold down deep at speed. Three that immediately come to mind are the Halco Laser Pro 7 m, the Rapala Xrap Magnum 30 (9 m+) and the Sebile Koolie Minnow LL (the 190 dives to 18 m at 5 knots). These lures will troll happily at 6.5 knots, which is an attractive speed for pelagics. The other thing to take into account is the fact that you don’t necessarily need the lure to be running through the bait. A lure hammering past above will look alone and vulnerable and will attract attention.
The other option is to employ sinking lures. Halco Tremblers and Rapala CD Magnums are ideal choices. Both lures can be counted down, so count how long it takes for one to sink (time a metre’s drop and multiply to suit your depth). The trick then is to free spool for the required time once the lures you are trolling line up with the strikezone. Once you think they are down there, hit the gas. This will cause the lures to shoot up and surge through the strikezone and hopefully attract some pelagic attention. This same technique works with rigged baits like wolf herring (though you don’t want to accelerate as hard). Lead chin guards can be purchased from most tackle shops and, when coupled with a set of big gangs, allow you to sink a big shiny bait into the strikezone head first before trolling it upwards.
Baiting
While both trolling and jigging allow you the advantage of covering plenty of ground and are relatively easy to attempt, live baiting is the ultimate fallback. If it’s a little later in the day or if the fish have been heavily pressured over consecutive days, live bait can be the only way to get shutdown fish to bite. I find that the best baits for pelagics are the ones that they can swallow whole. Yakkas, pike, gar, big herring and fusiliers are all top baits, but if you drop a bait jig over the spot you’re targeting, whatever you catch will usually be more than acceptable. When rigging the bait, think big. The bigger the bait, the bigger the hook you can get away with and big hooks are not a bad thing when you’re dealing with monster giant trevally, Spanish mackerel and the like. I prefer either a single hook pinned through the shoulder of the fish or a double hook rig made by joining with a snood. The hooks are tied the appropriate distance apart for the size of the bait and the rear hook goes through the back of the fish between the dorsal and tail fins. Both rigs can be tied with either very heavy mono (100 to 150 lb) or crimped wire.
Armouring
Speaking of wire, we should probably talk briefly about armouring your lures, jigs and baits. As many of you will know, the cooler months, especially around the start of spring, are prime times for chasing Spanish mackerel. This means that you have a high chance of running into a set of gnashing fangs that’d even give Sigourney Weaver a fright. Add to this the fact that monster size Spanish are notorious for holding down deep (they get to 180 cm and 48 kg) and you have reason to send your rigs down bristling with metal. First, let me say that it’s worth doing everything you can to avoid it first. Spooky fish will give wire a wide birth. However, if you must, use only a short length off the front of your lure, jig or bait and choose a more pliable multi-strand wire over kinky single-strand. I have mostly found that a short length to 20 cm is all that’s required. Mind you, don’t forget the other facets like the assist rigs on your knife jigs. These should be upgraded to wire also, as macks will even munch through Kevlar cord.
Dig deep
Well folks, I hope that has given you some insight into what techniques to use next time you’re chasing an arm-stretching, vertebrae-creaking, drag-screaming good time. It’s not all about finding numbers of fish, but more about finding quality fish. The deep is not the realm of the faint hearted, so come prepared!