Faith and Barramudi

Jerkbait is one of the best choices of fishing barramundi if you care of the numbers of fish you catch. I don't care of numbers too much because I like to throw bigbaits whether I catch fish or not. But I will bring jerkbaits for fun.

There are 2 types of jerkbaits when I look around the fishery and guys using. Floating model and sinking model. In the morning, barra is really lazy, and they tend to bite on the sinking type than the floating type. Thus, if I really care about the number of fish I catch today, the first choice in the morning will be the sinking jerkbait.

But I wonder why I have more floating types than sinking types in my tackle box in these days....

Anyway, when I bass fish, I use a long-bill, suspended type, too. Staysee (Lucky Craft), Squirrel (Jackall), K-IV (HMKL), Suger Deep (Bassday), and Kicker Eater (Evergreen) are all good stuff. But my current favorite long-bill jerkbait must be Faith of Evergreen.

I don't know why, but Faith doesn't produce many bites. But once it hooks up, the size of barramundi is huge. I never caught barra smaller than 5 kg on Faith.

Imakatsu made painting in the extreme way!

Simply awesome.

 

These pics are taken from Imakatsu website.

K. Imae Top Secret 

They are NOT live baits. They are called Super Live 3D Painting. And the pictured lure is called Bassroid. Below is Ayuroid 3D painting version.

And this is one of my favorite baits, a red-head jerkbait. This has caught tons of barramundi for me.

OK, I need to purchase the Bassroid when Imakatsu released because I wanna a direct face-to-face catching match against my redhead, and see which wins.

Magnum Long A and Barramundi

I was not expecting to stay in Thailand like this long when I received this assignment. My company promised me to pull me back from this country to Japan after my project finished. And also, I had an agreement to go home 7 days per month. But they broke the promise. I was sent to manage the whole big project (marketing) alone for our client, and every time I proposed new additional things, clients liked and ordered them. So, the project got bigger and bigger, and I didn’t have time to go home. In one way, my company broke the promise. In another way, I made the consequences by myself….

Anyway, I didn’t have time to go home in Japan; thus, I asked my wife to buy and ship me the lures from Japan. I asked her to buy me “bigbaits”. She asked back, how big. I told her “just choose something big.” She is an angler, too, so she knows lures. I even sent her pictures, names of the baits, and she sent me a package which contained this crazy lure, Magnum Long A.

I know Long A for a long time; however, I never expected the magnum size. She said “you said something big”, but I was expected Jerry Rago’s or Fish Arrow’s or Gan Craft’s bigbaits, not a 7 incher Long A. You know what I mean, right?

I thought this crazily long Magnum Long A is a joke just like many people thing Slide Swimmer 250 is a joke. But I thought I should give it a try at least once before I sell it on eBay. But what happened is, the first cast I made, Barramundi hit it hard. Even it hit the bait a couple of times before I reeled it in. I didn’t wanna believe the fact barra bit it, so I decided not to cast it back to the same spot. I moved to a different spot instead. Then cast, Kaboom! It caught a 5kg barra in the second cast.

What I like about Magnum Long A is, first, the body material; it’s made of polycarbonate which is very strong. It can be one of the strongest hard lure body ever made.
Second point is the way it wiggle and wobble. The way it makes the water move in sub surface is something other swimbaits or jerkbaits would not produce. Due to the large lip it has, it makes a wider body shake, and it can be retrieved slower than anglers can expect. It can be the same speed of regular swimbaits.

I don’t remember how many Barramundi I caught on this lure. A must.

Lates is effective to Barramundi

In Bangkok, Thailand, it looks like the whole year is summer and warm, but it’s not. We don’t have 4 seasons, but we have a dry season from November to March, a hot season from April to May, then June to September is the rainy season. 3 seasons in a year. The coldest day I experienced last year was in December; it was 17 degrees in the morning. It was too cold, so that I couldn’t get out of my bed. The hottest day I experienced was in May. It was probably over 40 degrees. I only walked a 100 meter to go to lunch, but I sweated like a waterfall.

Anyway, for barramundi fishing, when the rainy season gets closer to its end, the rain temperature declines, then the water temperature decreases as well. Men don’t feel the rain temperature much, but fish does. Surface water temperature gets lower, and barra start to cruise on the bottom in the morning instead of chasing baitfish on the surface.
And many Thai locals start casting tiny tiny plastic worms like a crappie worm and challenging themselves to catch 5 kg barra or bigger.

To me, this is the most difficult time of the year to fish barramundi due to the unstable water temperature. And sometimes the water looks like it had a fall turn over. Everyone says there is no fall in Thailand especially in Bangkok, but the nature proved. There it is.
Once we get this bad unstable weather, barra stop biting. Even local super technique, little bitty worms don’t get a bite. On the other hand, there is a lure that triggers many bites; Lates (Megabass).

It only dives 30cm deep with the steady retrieve. Because it obtains the strong buoyancy, it floats up the surface really quick when stops reeling. In this time of year, barra stay in the deeper range and not move around much, but no jerking, no twitching, just retrieving the bait like a crankbait, barra attack the lure intensely.

I like the way Lates rolls its body. Nothing wiggles like it.

So, the day I had many bites with Lates, some Thai guys came to ask me what I was throwing. No one understood why fish bit although it was an easy day. In the very next week, it was so difficult to fish again, but Lates only worked.