Trolling the Pumicestone Highway by Mangrove Jack

Trolling the Pumicestone Highway by Mangrove Jack

I’m on…..my mate Chris yelled over the motor for about the fifth time that afternoon just as I managed to get it started again. He was on fire this afternoon. Hooked up again to another nice flathead or lizard as they are affectionately known. The little Tilsan Minnow in colour Sunset/Mango was wreaking havoc and my job was to get the net ready…...again. I didn’t mind and just laughed. Great to see a good mate having a ball. It’s what it’s all about on the water. Another nice lizard hit the net this time in the high fifty-centimetre mark. I managed to get a couple that afternoon trolling using my hot pink version of that lure but just couldn’t compete. I think we ended up with twelve that afternoon in atrocious conditions and kept a few as we love our flathead in sour cream and mushrooms recipe that Chris the master seafood chef had discovered.

One of our first trolled lizards. Back in the day probably 20 years ago all we could get our hands on was the Manns Series from the USA. But they were very good I must admit in the stretch 10+ and 5+ series. This was one of our first taken across the Power Boat Club on a channel inside Bribie Island. The lure in it’s mouth is a Manns Stretch 5+. A cracking good all round water colour and troll lure. The 10+ is also a top Mangrove Jack lure for casting into the timber and cranking back. These days my favourite casting jack lure is by far the Tilsan Barra in either Qantas colour (red head/white body) or red baron (replicates a young jack as they are very territorial).

What is this all about you ask? Trolling for flathead in the Pumicestone Passage using small hard bodied deep diving lures with a bib. Admitted not as trendy these days as throwing plastics and stick baits on light fancy spin sticks, which I love doing by the way but still a highly effective technique that is easy to learn and one worth having in your fishing arsenal of magic tricks! The other good part of trolling hard bodies by the way in the Pumicestone is the by catch. Tailor and trevally of different sorts love getting in on the act and so, I’m told do jew aka mulloway however I think someone is teasing me with that one as they know I’m desperate to get one and haven’t…..yet.

How do you do this you may ask well read on and hopefully in a few short paragraphs I’ll explain it as best I can and you can go and buy a couple of lures to try if you haven’t already done so and away you go trolling behind your tinny, yak or whatever else you can get your hands on that floats and can pull a lure at medium walking pace. 

That afternoon was spent trolling in Caloundra at the Northern end of the Pumicestone Passage along what we called the rock bar which as we had discovered earlier that bream season due to a good colour sounder was a line of rock that ran to the North at the mouth of a large drain running up on to the bait flats. Where’s this you may ask…..well it doesn’t matter, the classic fishing reply of someone protecting his spots but what does matter is all you need to do this technique is stick to a few basic rules. At this point I’d like to thank the gun fishing authors I grew up with reading Modern Fishing and Fishing World. The works of Dr David Green, Steve Starling, Blue Phillips and Rod Harrison are legendary in Australian fishing circles and I’m basically reiterating here a lot of their information combined and I thank them dearly for all their articles over the years. My mate Chris and I couldn’t wait for the monthly edition to come out. He’d buy Modern Fishing, I’d buy Fishing World and then we’d swap and keenly discuss any new techniques that these legends had discovered. 

My mate Chris or the Lizard Wizard as I like to call him. Flathead seem to follow him like fleas on a dog with a trolled up nice keeper……again!

Okay let’s do this trolling thing and hook a flathead. By the way and I know others that fisherman in the Flathead Classic have done way better by the way, our best efforts doing this further down the passage were sixteen flathead in two hours, all keeper size in varying lengths up to about high 60’s that day and we kept some for the plate. This technique has worked for us on lizards up to 82cm and down to ones that would nearly fit in your hand. Big boys still like to eat jellybeans remember. This technique may not outfish live bait, plastics bla bla at certain times and the fisherman debate rages on. We’re fisherman we like to debate and have our opinions but this works, covers a lot of territory and it’s a fun and relaxing way to fish if you want to try.

Okay go and buy a couple of lures from your favourite tackle shop that you know will hit the bottom in the area that you intend to fish. This is where a sounder is very handy but not essential. You need the lure to be hitting and puffing up the bottom. A flathead is designed to bury in the bottom and their eyes are on top of their head and will be looking up for prey to come swimming past them and they will smash it as it comes past. I will list some of our favourite lures here probably much to all my mates disgust and pull the knives out of my back later. We use 8-12lb pound braid on our baitcasters and spinning reels and a rod length leader or trace as some people call it of 12lb fluorocarbon in order to hopefully prevent a big crocodile inhaling our lure and head shaking and wearing through the trace. We generally troll 2 to 3 lures depending on the area and how much maintenance we need to do on the lures due to snagging a bit of weed etc. If trolling 3 out of your tinny the lure behind the motor needs to a good deep diver and in close lets say 20-30m back. Like trolling offshore you want to be able to turn without hooking up your outside lines. A Bomber 15A or Tilsan Barra or similar here is perfect. The other two rods can be handheld or put in holders after they are set back at about 40 – 60m even 80m at times if you are trolling the shallows and don’t want the motor noise to affect the fish. When talking shallow I’m referring to less than 4ft. Yes I’m old school and all my sounders are set to feet and therefore you guys can do the conversion. 

A nice lizard taken by The Wizard this time on a Tilsan Minnow in bronze/gold just inside the old Caloundra North Bar. The flathead used to congregate here every October/November and the Wizard could smell them I reckon! Bang the bottom with that lure and stir it up. It’s an adrenaline rush for flathead seeing all that food being stirred up. Troll with the electric motor if you can as then you’re really in stealth mode in the shallows. And yes…..you can cast and retrieve these lures with a rod tip twitch or just a straight crank as they have their own action if that’s what really floats your boat. I really like cast and retrieve. It’s active an can be very productive.

Not the dirty dozen but the deadly half dozen. To be honest our fav's would be the Aussie Tilsen and Mad Mullet's. Top left going clockwise. Mad Mullet Micro mullet, mad mullet original, Tilsen Minnow but the barra is also a goodie, the zerek tango shad 50F, the Tilsen Minnows in Sunset Mango colour, the Maria MS/1D555P.

Yes that's right, there is a lot of pink in the tackle box. For a very good reason!

Most of our trolling is done in the passage between 3 – 10 ft with most flathead coming from the 6-8ft mark on the edge or drop off into a channel. Look for wading birds on the flats and stingrays as this is an area and mixture of sand and mud where a flathead likes to bury most. If you have a weed bed where prawns and other baitfish like to live beside you even better! Troll your boat between a slow to medium walking pace WITH the tide as the flathead will face into the tide to feed and expects the baitfish to be moving with the tide and not sneaking up behind him to scare the proverbial out of him! We use braid when we troll on all our lines because it is low stretch therefore is better at hooking the fish on strike and more sensitive if your lure isn’t swimming right eg a bit of weed has stuffed your lure action or the treble has tangled up in the leader. You will feel this on the line as you line will go dead and your rod tip will stop twitching and working correctly. I like to hand hold my line and now and again twitch the rod tip forward half a metre to add a bit more action to the swimming lure like with barra fishing but hey whatever floats your boat. It’s fishing remember. Stay flexible in your mind and try new things. 

Okay you’re trolling WITH the tide in the LAST 2-3 hours of the run out tide we prefer as most of the flathead are now concentrated in certain areas and have been forced off bait flats by the tide and are waiting to pounce on unsuspecting whiting, mullet, herring and nearly everything else that has fins. We are using a fast action graphite rod meaning it has a reasonably soft tip but locks up fast therefore setting the hooks quickly into the fish unlike if you were bait fishing and want a soft action fibreglass rod so the flatheads moves off with or sits on the bait for a while without feeling much pressure. The trebles should be good quality chemically sharpened hooks and we will change these if they are not on the lure. The lures that I mention here all come with suitable hooks to start with. You have now found that channel in about 4-10ft of water to troll along and there are only about a million of these in the Pumicestone Passage to try. If I had my choice when I die my lizard troll nirvana run though will look like this. There will be wading birds up on the yabby banks near the mangroves, there will be a weed bed on the drop off to the deeper water, there will be creeks feeding into the main channel and it will be quite narrow where the fish have to be concentrated and there are stingrays present in that nice grey bottom mix of sand and mud that a flathead loves to camouflage into. Yes there are spots like this in the passage and you need to do your homework to find them but this technique will work in most channels. When I retire in a few years I’m looking forward to doing a major reconnaissance of the passage!

The results of one of our troll afternoons out the front of Bells Creek Caloundra. This is a while ago and of course we can’t and won’t keep numbers like this these days thank goodness. What I really wanted to emphasise is that they were all taken in a 50m troll area showing how they like to congregate if you can just match what they like during certain parts of the tide.

Last but not least check that your lures are always swimming okay and that they are bumping the bottom. You’ll feel the nudges etc. I try to stay away from rocky areas due to snagging and will still hook up on some timber and this is where a good lure retriever comes in handy and has saved us serious dollars. We like to use Australian made lures where we can like the Tilsan Minnow and Barra, and Mad Mullets etc but any deep diving eg up to 10ft bib up to 100mm in length will generally get the job done. We generally find that lures in the passage around the 50mm mark are the most effective to get the most strikes however you can certainly troll bigger and target the bigger girls. Colours oh no now you’ve started something. All fisherman love the great colour debate!!! You figure it out but our favourite is bright pink in dirty or clear water, gold is a solid performer as it grey ghost like a poddy mullet colour in clear water. Fish your more fluorescent colours in dirtier water. The hook up on your rod at times can be quite violent which always brings a smile to my face or reasonably sluggish and then you feel the fish move off. When I say violent I don’t mean a jack strike but they can go. Rod Harrison said it best and it still sticks in my mind thirty years later that a hard strike from a fish feels like running over a brick with a lawn mower!! Either way you will notice it no worries. Keep the flathead’s head down in the water as you net them so you don’t allow the fish to head shake and wear your leader through. Try and net them head first. Don’t hold them up vertically if you don’t intend to keep them as this supposedly breaks or ruptures a lot of capillaries around their gill area. We always have pliers to remove the hooks and lip grips to control the fish so you don’t get spiked by those evil little side horns that we all love and I’ve lost blood to over the years. I tip them upside down at times using the “thumb on bum” technique and this temporarily seems to put them into a state of hypnosis as a neat party trick. I like to use a glove and cradle them with my thumb in their mouth so I don’t get sandpapered to release if they’re big.

Some big girls courtesy of my favourite little pink jellybean the hot pink Tilsan Minnow. They take poll position in my tackle box. All swam to live another day. Pink is a good all round colour to have in your box. The top left fish was taken near the bar, the above one was taken near bills boat hire and the one on the left near the old Blue Hole all in different water clarities. We generally will always have out a mix of colours though until we see what’s happening for the day.

Well I hope this has helped and I’d love to hear back if you get a few. This technique covers a lot of area and you will find new spots on the way. It’s an active form of fishing for the kids and let’s you look around and enjoy the beautiful Pumicestone Passage. The technique works most of the year round except what we’ve generally found is that in winter the lizards will tend be in the shallower water than in summer. Try different depth runs. If you find one flathead you will find more as they generally like to hang together. Look after these great fish and they’ll be there for your grandkids as everyone enjoys and is proud of catching the mighty flathead. Tight lines,

Mangrove Jack

Pumicestone Passage Pirates Writer

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