Yellow and cyan… cyan and black, brown and yellow, white. Wading through magnified tea, individual leaves like ribbons of brown tagliatelle: a hot broth. Feet in the inner lagoon, eyes all the way out, bouncing along the horizon, stuttering blinks against the brightness. I can hear the ghost crabs pithering up and down on the beach, cooking quietly. They don’t dare cool off in the sea.
It’s about tea-time on a remote sand cay in the Seychelles, and I’m wading out through water as hot as soup, to climb onto a big dead tree about 5ft up from the water line. In front of me lies a tranquil lagoon, stained brown with decaying seagrass. Directly below me is a sandy gutter, about the width of a small trout stream. Beyond lie open flats of seagrass and broken coral rock. From my perch atop the fossilised Casuarina trunk, I have a perfect view of the gutter and its inhabitants. Butterfly fish, picasso triggers, and other small reef denizens flit from one small rock to another like flocks of birds.
I’m playing a waiting game. The tide has just turned and is beginning to push over the flats. I know from watching this spot over the past few days that sooner or later, groups of trevally: brassy, bluefin, and small GTs, will push through here, looking for unsuspecting prey. They will try and herd them close to the shoreline, and then smash them against that barrier between land and sea. The other day, a beautiful goatfish flew out of the water at my feet, its body patterned like a sunrise. A big swirl arose behind, as a GT of about 5 kilos turned away, thwarted. I held the little fish for a while until its pursuers had gone, then returned it to the lagoon.
Pound for pound, the jack family contains some of the hardest fighting fish on the planet, and they are mostly caught on heavy gear. The GT in particular is mainly known in angling circles as a heavy tackle fish, with even saltwater fly anglers tending to opt for high drags and strong lines. For me though, catching these powerful predators on light lure gear remains one of my favourite ways to fish. Most tropical shorelines contain some type of jack or trevally, and in many places, the majority of the fish are small, in the 1-10kg (2-25lb) range. These fish are well within the grasp of gear and techniques that in the UK we would call HRF, or even LRF – rods with casting weights between 0.5 and 20g, reels carrying PE 0.6 to 1.2 or thereabouts. On this sort of setup, even a small trevally provides an exhilarating battle, but in the correct conditions, it is possible to reliably tame fish up to about 30 lbs.
The muggers approach
Back on my log, I have spotted the outlines of a predatory gang approaching. The lead fish is a brassy of about 7lbs, his three somewhat smaller droogs behind him, spread out in a loose v-formation across the width of the gully. They are just cruising lazily at the moment, about 50 yards uptide, so I have time to ready my cast. When the lead fish is about 15 yards away, I flick my lure – a 3-inch shad on a 5g jighead, into the gully. It lands with a gentle plop, and before I have time to consider whether to pause or retrieve, the rod is bent over and the reel is screaming like a jet engine. By the time my brain starts to piece together the situation, the fish is well away: a snap of the tail as the lead fish accelerates to engulf the lure, the line tightening, the big splash as it realises it has been hooked. The whine from my spool keeps increasing in pitch, the line angle getting ever shallower, and at this point I remember that I am really quite high above the water and in no position to follow the fish. I must have been out of my tree to cast from here, and that indeed is what I must do. I climb awkwardly down another foot or so, and launch myself into the water below: a slight shock to the knees, but I’m still basically upright and the fish is still attached.
Now it’s time to chase after the fish. When fighting trevally in shallow water, the main aim is to keep the line angle as high as possible. As the line between the rod tip and the fish gets more acute, the risk of two different bad outcomes increases: there is more chance that the fish will cause the line to pass a snag, such as a coral bommie or piece of rock, and there is a greater risk that the line will connect with the sharp scutes on the fish’s tail.
The fish has run out a bit over the seagrass, and then continued parallel to the shore. I splash after it, waste-deep in the lagoon, arms stretched above me like a gibbon, trying to keep the rod high. After a time, the run slows and I start to gain a bit of line. Catching up to roughly where it has run to, I can feel it hanging there in the tide, and try to pump it in a few metres, which spooks it and sends it running off again. This is the rhythm of a trevally fight – catch up to the fish, haul it in a bit while gently palming the spool, then when the next run begins, try to cushion the power of the fish as much as possible.
Eventually, after several repeats of this cycle, I finally manage to tire the fish, and slide it up onto the shore, a good 200 yards along from the tree. It is a perfect slab of peppered silver, deep powerful flanks lined with crescent fins and a stiff, powerful tail. I remove the hook, and swim the fish in the shallows until it begins to kick powerfully, and I let it go, watching it disappear out across the open flats.
Tackle
When fishing for smaller trevally, I am usually looking to present a paddletail shad of about 3-4 inches, in a manner that balances casting distance and finesse on the one hand, and line strength and abrasion resistance on the other. In areas where fish are small and there is little in the way of snags, this can mean a rod with a casting weight between 0.5-10g, PE0.6 braid and 10lb fluorocarbon leader. As the potential for larger fish and the presence of snags increases, so must the weight of the setup. Where there are likely to be fish of 10lb and upwards in weight, I switch to a PE1 setup, with casting weights in the “HRF” range – 10-30g, and leader of 15-30 lb fluoro. This is obviously mainly a fish welfare issue – there’s nothing admirable about fishing ultralight for fish that you have a very good chance of losing. However, there are benefits to the lighter gear that extend beyond bragging rights – although many trevally species can be incredibly aggressive feeders, there are times and situations where many species become rather finicky. Bluefin trevally in particular have a tendency to shy away from lures that are presented incorrectly. I don’t personally believe this is about the fish “seeing” the leader. It’s more that the fish are wary of a lure that doesn’t act right, and the reduced flexibility of a thicker leader affects the presentation of small lures.
Terminal tackle needs to be strong. While you might manage to tame a few fish on the sort of worm hooks you would use for perch in the UK, there is also a good chance of them being bent out during a fight, so aim to find the strongest patterns you can. For the larger lures I like the BKK Titan in 1/0, but for a 3” paddletail this is overkill. I have found the Rock-F from NineSeven Tungsten to be a good pattern for these. There are many other options out there though.
As to weight, I have been quite surprised to find that a decent cheb head in the 3-10g range will not in fact pull apart under the drag settings needed to land trevally. Until recently I shied away from this approach, preferring to use weighted open jigheads, but having experimented with them on several trips, I am now confident in using chebs, which opens up more options in terms of lure weighting and hook choice. Trevally have large, hard mouths and tend to give very confident bites, so there is no reason not to fish weedless.
As to lure choice, I have found shads with a slim body and a large paddle tail to be the most effective. For those of us that have worked hard to learn the coldwater rule of “less is more”, it can be tough to adapt to the desires of tropical fish that seem to shun subtlety, but I have found it pays to have a range of bright, flashy lures, as well as a few more subtle patterns for those situations when they turn finicky. From the UK plastics market, I have found the Fox Spikey shads to be effective, either in a dark colour or redhead-white. I have also done well on Fish Arrow Flash-J shads in pretty much any colour. Most of these lures are not very durable, so it is necessary to carry quite a few of them. Alternatively, I have also had a lot of success with Zman minnowz, which are considerably more hard wearing. On coral reef areas, triggerfish can be a real problem – biting the paddle off any lure that passes by, usually without being hooked. In this case, a good alternative is to tie a few basic bucktail jigs or streamer flies around an open jighead. I don’t find them as effective as paddletails, but at least they survive the attentions of the triggers.
Location and tactics
Jacks and trevally are widespread in their distribution, occurring throughout the tropical and equatorial regions of the Atlantic and Indopacific oceans. They are present in a wide variety of habitats, from open reef and seagrass flats to sheltered lagoons and mangroves, as well as rocky shorelines, surf beaches and harbour walls. As a result it is challenging to provide concrete and exhaustive advice that works everywhere, for all species. Most of my personal experience has been from the reef flats and lagoons of the indopacific, but I have also used the same methods in Pacific coast of Costa Rica and Panama, and the Riviera Maya on the Atlantic coast of Mexico.
Let’s imagine that you are on holiday somewhere that you think will hold fish, and that this is a “DIY” trip somewhere where local knowledge is scarce. How do you locate fish? Well firstly, your watercraft from the UK still works – like all predators, jacks will congregate where the food is, and features that work in bass fishing will work for them too. Rocky outcrops, the mouths of estuaries, and gutters on surf beaches will all hold fish, as will pressure edges where the tide is held back by sudden depth changes such as reef edges, or fields of coral bommies. Predators like to be where their prey are in abundance, and also in places where baitfish are at a disadvantage, where they can reduce the degrees of freedom the prey have to move, or use reduced visibility or strong currents against them.
I would start my search by picking a section of shoreline with a few of these features, and then either walk the shoreline or wade the shallows, blind-casting as I go. In most cases, jacks respond well to a rapid retrieve, so initially I would use this approach to cover a lot of ground quickly. If the water is relatively shallow, I cast out and begin the retrieve almost as soon as the lure hits the water, retrieving the lure rapidly with a few twitches and direction changes. If the water is somewhat deeper, with a bit of tide, then I prefer to fish mainly on-the-drop, allowing the lure to curve fall on a tight line until it hits the seabed, before ripping it back up in the water column and then fishing it back in this manner, with an exaggerated sink and draw approach. In both cases, the aim is to cover as much of the volume of water in front of you with your lure, before moving on. If no takes are forthcoming, keep moving and keep casting until you find the fish.
In the tropics, I have a strong preference for dawn over dusk. While fish can be caught throughout the day, first light will find the fish at their most voracious, which is excellent for searching. In principle, fish can be caught at all stages of the tide, though a given location may only hold fish at a particular window. As ever, watercraft is key. I have found that many species like to feed around features closer to shore on the flood, entering areas as soon as the water is deep enough to cover their backs. Once the tide turns, fish tend to retreat into deeper areas. This is just a generalisation though. There are specifics related to reef flats, lagoons, rocky shores etc, which I will leave for a future article, and other areas will have their own idiosyncrasies.
I hope this has given some indication of how I go about chasing these fantastic tropical sportfish on light gear. I plan to expand on what I have written here in future articles, and to cover some other aspects of tropical light game. Until next time!