Tackle Innovations Vol 9 2010

Better Results on Top

by Damon Olsen

Fishing with poppers is nothing new, but it is something that has gained a lot more interest lately, especially with travelling anglers. It is one of the most visual forms of fishing you can do, and truly one of the most exciting. Whether you are chasing peacock bass, snakehead, barramundi, GTs, cubera snapper or a whole host of other tropical sportfish, the use of surface lures, and particularly poppers is often one of the better ways to target these fish.

While fishing with surface lures, and poppers in particular is great fun, the conversion ratio between strikes and hookups, and then landed fish is pretty dismal in my experience. In this issue’s column we’re going to have a quick look at a couple of possible reasons for this, and point out a few things you might be able to do about it to try and get a few more fish in the boat.

I should preface this discussion by explaining a couple of things I believe to be true about the use of treble and single hooks, on not only surface lures, but lures of all kinds.
The fact is, if you are targeting big fish, then trebles are a waste of time in my opinion. By big fish we’re talking here about fish that are going to be in the 20kg and above range. Do you use trebles when trolling for marlin? What about when cubing for yellowfin? What about when livebaiting for kingfish? Hmmm… no I didn’t think so.

The question then is, why would you use a treble on a lure for targeting similarly large fish on a hard bodied lure such as a popper? It is hard to find a practical answer to this question, and this is the reason that we started using single hooks for everything involving bigger fish. I think what has happened here is that lure manufacturers have always used trebles on smaller lures for smaller fish, which is a majority of the lure market in reality. Once they started making larger lures to target bigger fish, they just increased the lure size, and along with that, the trebles that were used.

Read the rest in the latest Fishing Wild magazine.