It has been a while since I sat down and talked to you about some of the fun things I have been doing on the fishing scene. Sorry about the delay but things have been hectic and there has been a bit too much going on in my life.

Lures have been high on my list of priorities and some of the things I have been doing with the latest lures have really blown me away. Small improvements have made a big difference to my fishing. I have been doing a bit of work with the Halco factory on hard bodied lures of late and the factory tuning of the little 35 Cm Scorpion has been a bit of an eye opener and a great success. The original Scorpion was a great lure and the slow sinking version still has a place in my lure box. If you want to sink a lure down in the water column and still get it do the sexy tango then this lure will do the job. Deep snags and deep oyster leases are ideal places for the sinking Scorpion. Just let the lure sink to the right depth and then twitch and crank the lure until a fish eats it. In shallow clear water however I just wasn't satisfied with the lure. To catch large wary fish in the shallow clear stuff I had to fiddle around with it to make it a slow-rising floating lure. There just had to be a better way.

Ben Patrick from Halco is a very innovative person and he invited me to his Fremantle factory to see if we could come up with a version of the 35 that would really do the business straight out of the packet. With bream and trout firmly in mind we changed the treble hooks to a lighter guage for super penetration, downsized the split rings to lighten the lure, and streamlined the hook-hangers. The metal omega clip and split ring on the original version were fine in a slow sinking lure but we needed something radical to provide a strong light towing point that would still keep the lure in tune after being hammered by fish. The technical department at Halco came up with a Lexan omega clip that did the job perfectly. To get the action just right we also changed the bib design. I guess the rest is history and the little floating Scorpion is now my favourite hard-bodied lure for trout and big bream.

I recently worked at the Sydney boat show and made some presentations on the Super Tank. The tank had some barramundi in it and as the show progressed they relaxed enough to start eating lures. Or should I say some lures! It was a real blast to tell a couple of hundred people how the sneaky scorpion was meant to be eaten by fish as it slowly rose in the water column, and then to have those people actually see barra follow the lure in slow motion and suck it in. This happened time after time and it just showed me that we were on a winner with the wriggle and stop retrieve, and that we were justified in designing a lure to suit that particular retrieve. It was also kind of neat to think that a retrieve style designed to fool sneaky old bream also turns other fishy predators on.

I have a great love of and a respect for hard-bodied lures and they are probably going to be a major part of my angling box of tricks forever, but lately I have been putting a lot of effort and energy into soft plastics. This is a fascinating aspect of the fishing game and one that has been a bit slow to take off in Australia. Again bream, estuary perch, bass and flathead were the fish that I based my plastics research on for an Australian soft plastics range.

The project turned out to be a huge one and I spent many hours over two years testing and designing lures. I had plenty of help from my partner in crime Steve Starling who delights in testing lures on anything fishy and whose input was of great value. Both of us had been scouring the world (via the internet ) to find the very best soft plastics to catch our local fish. There were certainly some good ones out there but lures that caught our local fish well were scarce on the ground. In one way maybe that should not have surprised us because most of the lures imported into Australia are designed to catch other species of fish. There is some positive transfer from the American large mouth bass to our Aussie fish but realistically the good old bass is a very aggressive fish while our bream and bass can be very fussy at times. One thing that we did find was that just about every great lure for our fish was made in one particular factory located in mainland China. The brands varied but the same guys made the lures. By pure chance the Rapala VMC group bought the factory and that meant our designs could now be made in the best plastics factory on the planet. I had to visit the factory to see the lures being made and that was just an amazing experience.

To cut a very long story short we looked at everything on the world market, took notice of the successful features on the very best lures and incorporated them into three models and about 18 sizes. We worked on each model until we were happy with it and sometimes this meant a number of prototypes for just one size of one model. I am not scared to tell anyone how we did the job because I just don't think anyone else will have the resources, the time, or the absolute fanaticism to blow a year of their lives on a lure project for a small country like Australia. One thing I can tell you is that tiny differences in tail thickness, shape, and hardness of plastic alter the fish catching abilities of a soft plastic lure dramatically. Quality control is absolutely critical.

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I certainly learned a lot on the soft plastic Squidgy program and what happened when we threw a small Squidgy wriggler into a tank full of barramundi just blew me away. Not only did the fish eat the lure, they just wouldn't give it back! We bent the hooks over so the fish wouldn't get hooked which worked well, but I was unprepared for the way the fish accepted the rubber lures as real food and refused to spit them out.

On many occasions I pulled the lures away from the fish only to have them swim forward and eat them for a second time. Wow! I was impressed and so were the two hundred or so onlookers watching the demonstration. After the fish acted this way for six days in a row at the Sydney boat show, a few pennies started to drop and I just couldn't wait to try the lures again on wild fish. My chance came a few days later as I had to check out some flathead to catch for our Squidgy promotional video. I wanted to find some hot fishing without upsetting the fish so that they would still cooperate for the filming. After the tame barra in the tank I had enough confidence to fish the Squidgies without hooks. And guess what? Wild flathead ate the hell out of the lures and just didn't spit them out.

I now view the lures that we designed and refined as being basically as deadly as live bait but with the advantage that you don't have to catch it or keep it alive and you can cast it time after time without it 'dying.' Plastics don't go rotten in your tackle box either and you can use them again on the next trip. Now when I fish squidgies for flathead I regard striking as a formality. You can let them run with the bait and strike whenever you feel like it! After a while when fishing the plastics with no hooks, I let one fish eat the lure and waited until he sat on the bottom with it somewhere in his mouth. I carefully used the electric motor to follow the line until the big flattie spooked in a cloud of mud. When he left town I just opened the bail arm on my spinning reel and let the line pay out. The fish went about thirty meters and then sat on the bottom again - still with the squidgy in his mouth!

This may be hard to believe but I did it more than once. This performance would have brought out the men in the white coats if someone had seen me laughing like a crazy man and rushing around the place on the Minn Kota chasing fish that had eaten hookless soft plastic baits. After spending a year or so cutting soft plastics to bits with razor blades and welding new sections to them, you can tend to go a bit mad. The flathead thing is definitely out of hand and maybe we have overdone the lures. I think they may be a bit too deadly for the good of the fish populations.

Bream were certainly high on the target list when we designed the new plastics and I guess we have learned a few tricks about using them on sneaky old blue noses. I suspect that bream will hold rubber lures in their mouths for less time than flathead will and I think that might be why new comers to soft plastics fishing have trouble getting started on them. Confidence is the key word here and once you have confidence that a bream will eat your soft plastic lure, then it will happen. Getting started actually isn't all that easy because you have to consider a whole system that suits catching bream.

Even before you start to worry about the nuances of how long to wait before striking a bream that has just inhaled your squidgy, you have to get near the fish without spooking it, put together a suitable rod and reel combination to present the plastic, and rig the plastic to a suitable jig head. None of these things is particularly difficult to organize but it all has to be done before you can consistently catch fish.

I think most anglers are putting the system together well enough to make a bream eat a soft plastic lure, but detecting the actual moment when a fish eats the lure is still a difficult hurdle to overcome for many neophytes. This could be because most anglers are expecting to feel a bite or an aggressive take. After all, people who are already fishing metal lures and hard-bodied lures all feel it when a fish aggressively belts a lure, so they expect to feel the same thing when a bream hits a soft plastic lure.

The trouble is that bream rarely hit a soft plastic lure hard. I have seen plenty of them eat soft plastics over the last few years and the take is nearly always the same. The bream swims up behind the plastic, puts his nose almost on it, and then sucks it into his mouth where he crushes it with his powerful teeth. This suck makes the lure travel from the lips to the teeth which amounts to about an old fashioned inch or less. The good news is that this 'suck' is one of the fastest things on the planet and if you watch your line carefully it is both detectable and identifiable. The way to see the bite is to lift the tip of your rod to make your squidgy swim up off the bottom and then to drop your rod tip to allow enough slack line for the lure to swim back towards the bottom. Watch the slack line as the lure swims down and eventually you will see a tiny, but lightning-fast, twitch. This twitch means that a bream has sucked your lure into his mouth and you need to strike before he spits it out again. The problem with bream is that they tend to suck the lure in and then stop dead in the water before they taste it and ultimately reject it or swallow it.

What this means is that many fish can eat a soft plastic lure and reject it without the angler ever being aware that he has had a bite! The latest generation of soft plastics has great fish appeal with lifelike look, feel and taste so an increasing number of bream suck them in and actually try to swallow them. During this process, a small percentage of the fish actually hook themselves and pull hard on the line. These are the fish that most beginners catch, but the frustrating thing is that only about one fish in ten that take a lure will be hooked without the angler striking actively at the 'twitch'. One of the nice things about bream on soft plastics is that skill is rewarded. If you stare at that slack line just above where it enters the water, hard enough and long enough, you are going to start noticing the takes. After a while the whole process seems to almost circumvent the rational part of the brain and you get so tuned in that the line flicks as though a mosquito has run into it and your arm just shoots skywards by itself and hooks the fish.

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There is definitely something very 'Zen' in this type of fishing and although the fish may be only humble bream, catching them in this way elevates them somehow and seems to generate a powerful addiction akin to sex or drugs or gambling. Catching bream on soft plastics is the cocaine of fishing - it starts as a bit of fun but before long you just can't leave it alone and you notice that you have just blown thirty grand on a new boat and a stack of thousand dollar Ian Miller bream busters.

I have been refining my bream techniques as well as far as the type of line I like to use in different situations. I still like to use the four pound fireline with a fluorocarbon leader as my main strike weapon but I have been doing a lot more work with the ultra light stuff. There is no doubt in my mind that this spider web gear puts more fish on the end of your line. I have been having great success on 1 kilo Sensation from berkley in deep water or very clear water.

I don't even use a leader on this stuff even though going 'bare-arsed'on big bream is a bit scary. The obvious problem with the ultra-thin line is in landing the fish and using the stuff around snags or oyster leases is right out of the question. In the last bream comp at Forster I fished a baitcaster, big Halco scorpions and Fins braid of ten kilo to try and drag big fish from the heavy jungle. Where the light stuff really shines is in the deep water. When I find fish on my trusty Furuno sounder in twenty feet or more of water, I have no fear of using the super light line. All my really big catches of bream in the deeps have relied on light mono. I don't pretend to know why it works so well but I suspect that the transparency of the line must help.

God knows what a bream is actually able to see in deep, sometimes dirty, water but I think their senses are probably a lot better developed than we suspect. All I can tell you is that it is worth learning to fish the fine, clear stuff. With a bit of practice you can pull pretty hard on one kilo line and each individual fish comes in relatively quickly.

Bream are tricky fish - I have certainly said that before but the more I fish for them the more I believe it to be true. The reason we have so many different sizes of squidgy is that one particular combination of lure size, jig head and colour will fish on the day. If you fine-tune your system to suit exactly what the fish want on any given day, you will enjoy a lot of success. I will give you a bit of an example.

The other day I was fishing a rock wall that dropped into about a meter and a half of water, then dropped again to about five metres. I was using a squidgy wriggler No 2 with our smallest jig head and catching a few fish. After a while I realised that all my strikes were coming from the shallows before the major drop-off. I stuck with the little jig head but went up to a number 3 wriggler in the same colour. This slightly larger lure swam down just a little bit slower on the small head and the fish responded to it much more aggressively in the shallow water. Sometimes the reverse happens and you can put a slightly smaller tail on the same size head to make it drop a little quicker into deeper water. Keep thinking and experimenting when you are fishing plastics because bream especially respond to fine-tuning.

I used to think that that getting kids hooked on fishing instead of on drugs was a good thing but now I am starting to have my doubts. The latest studies show that bream on lures is more addictive that heroin and quite possibly more expensive when you start shelling out for those bream busters, sounders, boats and motors. Ah well, that's life. In the next five minutes I am going to hitch up my trusty boat and drive ten hours to check out the Manning River before the next bream tournament. I am seriously thinking of switching over to that heroin, it just can't be any more expensive than a bad bream habit.

See you next time Bushy.

Stop press!

Almost forgot to brag about my biggest ever bream to date! I hate that. This one was a fat-as-mud pregnant black bream taken at Mallacoota inlet. My mate Wrighty and I were fishing up the Wallagaraugh River and I have to say that wrighty was kicking my butt a bit too convincingly. Unfortunately he couldn't resist the temptation to rub it in and was giving me heaps about how badly I was going. Big mistake Wrighty. Just before we finished up I threw a cast into a pile of snags and mentioned that I had caught a few good ones here before. The line gave a bit of a twitch and I set the hook into what looked to be a pretty decent fish.

I had caught one four pound two about a week earlier and I reckoned that this one was every bit as big. We put the fish in the live well and called in to the Wallagaraugh Retreat campground to borrow some scales. Both our jaws dropped when the fish pulled the needle down to 2.1 Kilos. Catching this fish was just pure plain arse, but I'll take luck over skill any day. We only snapped a couple of quick shots of the fish and I have a pretty stupid look on my face, but what the hell - two kilo bream don't come along every day!

We released the fish after we weighed it and I spent the drive home explaining to Wrighty that catching a few little fish from the back of the boat while you are being chaufered around hardly makes you a star fisherman. On the other hand you surely must be pretty good to catch only one fish and to make it two kilos!

The fish took a No 2 squidgy wriggler in Avocado colour. The four pound two ounce fish from the week before took a No 2 Squidgy wriggler in jelly prawn colour.

See you later I am off fishing - Bushy.