A hook-up orientation is a plus over grassy or rocky bottom.
Making lures that look exactly like the real thing has had a checkered history. Some of the molded frogs and plastic worms of my youth looked real enough to scare the bejeepers out of my mother, but didn’t fool fish at all.
That’s not the case these days. There is a plethora of lures for salt water that might be called “nature fakers” for their remarkable resemblance to real live shrimp, crabs and baitfish. Not only do they look like the real thing, they feel like, and can be made to move like the real thing, too. And some are even alleged to taste like the natural.
Most important, gamefish eat them like the real thing—and pinfish and other bait-stealers usually don’t. Bait-nippers are the scourge of livebait anglers, but they largely ignore plastic fakes, with the exception of pesky blowfish (puffers), which have a penchant for plastic shrimp in particular. And I’m sure anglers have stories about other less-than-desirable catches on some of these lifelike plastics in their respective waterways, too.
Throwing a natural-looking imitation, you never know what you’re going to get. On a recent trip to the Indian River Lagoon near Stuart, Florida I joined a few friends to wade the hard-bottomed flats just north of the St. Lucie Inlet, where the green water varied from knee- to waist-deep at the top of the tide. We all chose to toss 4-inch plastic shrimp. First fish among us was a mega-snook that taped 43 inches long, way more fish than most would expect to encounter in such shallow water.
A few hundred yards down the bar, one of the guys stuck a 10-pound snook and between us we caught four little snook, along with several jacks and ladyfish. We moved a couple miles upriver to a spoil bar, and there all of us started bailing trout—no big ones, but it was a 15-incher on every cast as we tossed the lures into schooling glass minnows swarming around the shallows. Anytime the trout missed, a ladyfish latched on. A nice mixed bag in under four hours. And every fish we caught grabbed a fluorescent “glo” shrimp, eating the lure at least as quickly as they would have the real thing. Blessedly, we scored zero pinfish, and spent no time rebaiting our hooks—except when a puffer homed in on the tail. Again, puffers do not distinguish between plastic and meat, unfortunately.
I’ve had similar luck fishing plastic mullet in the surf as well as drifted in deeper passes for snook. And plastic crabs as well as mullet and jumbo plastic shrimp are coming into their own as unbeatable lures for beach tarpon. The crabs and the shrimp are redfish killers on the flats, and the shrimp are also one of the few lures that flounder seem to really like, even without the addition of a bit of cut fish or cut shrimp as added flavoring. And cobia anglers all around the state have now discovered that plastic eels are a deadly offering when the big ling make their spring run along the beaches.
There are several differences between modern and historic nature imitations. First, manufacturers are now making the lures so that they’re balanced to move through the water upright and on track, much more resembling the real thing. The plastic is softer, so that when a fish takes hold, it’s likely to hang on and try to eat the bait all the way—you have more time to set the hook than you do with a “hard” bait.
And perhaps most importantly, anglers have learned how to fish these lures to bring out their deadly effectiveness. In general, fishing the fakes like jigs or hard baits such as plugs results in little success. They’re not designed with the wobble and flash of most plugs, and they just don’t do much when fished with conventional retrieves.
But visualize them as if you were actually fishing a live bait and things begin to happen fast. A big part of the trick is to fish the lures in areas where the natural bait is going to be present, and then to make your presentation imitate the movements of the natural as nearly as possible.
For example, say you’re working a dock at night for snook. When the tide is slack, there’s not going to be a lot happening. But once the tide starts to flow, either in or out, shrimp are going to be pulled past that light by the current. You want your plastic shrimp to come by just the way the live ones do—no faster, no slower. This means you cast the bait uptide, let it sweep the dock, and be alert for that quick “tap-tap” that means a snook has inhaled it.
The same is true for fishing a crab. Find an area where tarpon are working a weedline on outgoing tide around a big west coast pass and you can be sure part of what they’re eating is the small brown crab known as the “pass crab.” Toss a soft-plastic crab of the same size and color close to the weeds where you see the fish rolling and hang on. Fish the bait with no weight on a 3X strong short-shank livebait hook, size 4/0, either through one tip of the “shell,” or impaled sideways—remember, that’s the way crabs generally travel when swimming. Let it drift with the tide, twitching gently now and then, swimming it to the top occasionally. Sooner or later, you’ll see that big chrome mirror flash as a fish rolls up and sucks it in.
Plastic mullet are usually fished deeper. Some come with built-in weights—light weights for the flats, heavier for the passes. Note how finger mullet move—they tend to nose along bottom, sucking up detritus, then swim forward a few feet, then nose down to feed again. Imitate this motion on the flats and you’ll soon feel that familiar “bump” that signals a take. In the passes, the small mullet are likely to be traveling in or out rather than stopping to feed, so there the idea is to cast uptide and let the lure sweep down, just off bottom, at the same speed as the current. If the line jumps or if the lure stops, you set the hook. If you don’t get bit, reel in immediately, move downtide a few feet, and repeat, continuing to cover the water, and paying particular attention to points, jetties, upwellings, breakwaters and other fish concentration areas. Fish in a flow-way like this sometimes feed a bit like freshwater trout; if the lure comes at them in their feeding lane, they’ll eat it every time, but if it’s only a few yards off to one side, they ignore it, so saturation casting is the ticket.
