What do I need to start softbait fishing?

I’ll get to the question in the title of this post shortly, but first… Always exciting to get some new goodies delivered by the courier and today I got these:

 

Nothing major, but I didn’t seem to have many choices left of softbait that I like, so I bought some variety. My old favourite is the Nuclear Chicken (top left) and I only started using the Banana Prawn (bottom) recently, but they seem to be pretty effective! Sometimes when nothing else seems to get a bite, the pink ones do well, so I like to have 1-2 of them
As for the jigheads (hooks), I usually fish in relatively shallow water (4-12m), so the 3/8oz jigheads are usually good for me, but I do like to have the 5/8oz around for slightly deeper water and for trolling. When I go to the Coromandel or somewhere I’ll be in deeper water (30-40m), then I take a few 1oz jigheads along as well.

What tackle do you need for softbait fishing from a kayak?

I remember when I heard so many kayak fishermen talking about softbaiting or softbait fishing, it sounded complicated and I was a little unsure what I needed to get started with it. Truth is, all softbaiting is is catching with a particular style of “lure” (if I can call it that). So you could put a softbait onto your normal fishing hook and give that a go. Chances are, you won’t do that well, so there’s some “improvements” you can do to your tackle to make those “lures” more attractive.

Jigheads

Firstly, you don’t want to use a regular hook with a weight attached somewhere higher up on the line as you do with traditional fishing. A major objective of those improvements you make to your tackle is to increase the responsiveness of the softbait. When your rod’s tip moves up, you want the softbait to move up as well. Now if you have a heavy weight on the line somewhere up top and the hook (which holds the softbait) dangling below that, then that weight is going to absorb most of the movement of the rod tip. You want the fish to think that your softbait is a live prey, so you want the movement to go down all the way to the hook. And that’s where a jighead comes in, a jighead is just a hook with a built-in weight. You can see two packets of them in the middle of the photo above. Nothing more to it… in softbaiting you use a jighead instead of a separate weight and hook.

If you’re just starting out and you don’t know what to buy, then buy a 5/8oz and size #2/0. As you get more comfortable with softbaiting, you can experiment with lighter jigheads. General rule is you want to go as light as possible while still getting the softbait to the bottom. Whether you’ll get to the bottom or not is determined by how fast you’re moving, how fast the current is moving and how deep you are.

Braid

Braid is simply a different type of fishing line from the normal “mono” line that you might be used to. Mono is stretchable whereas braid is not. Again, the more stretch there is in the line, the less responsive your softbait will be. Braid is also a lot thinner than mono for the same strength. So you’ll want to replace your fishing line with braid. I’m not really an expert, so I can only tell you what I buy. I like the Berkley Fireline Exceed or Tournament in 11lb weight for snapper. the theory is that the lighter the line, the less it’ll chase away fish, but I generally take one softbait rod with 11lb line and one with 30lb for trolling and I use both of them while drifting and I do catch snapper on both.

If you tie your jighead straight onto your braid and put one of the softbait in the photo onto the jighead, you’ll catch fish. In fact, there’s been times when I’ve been in too big a hurry to tie a leader on and I’ve just tied the jighead to the braid and done fine with that. To improve your chances though, and decrease your chances of losing your catch, you might want to put a leader between the braid and the jighead.

Leader

Your leader is just a piece of line between your braid and jighead. Often it’ll be a lot heavier weight than your braid to withstand some sharp teeth. Truth be told, I know even less about leaders than I do about braid. I just keep a roll of this in stock, 20lb for softbaiting. You can see a previous post of mine about how to tie the braid to the leader.

Last thing I’ll mention here is that braid is expensive and it’s not that easy to get braid to “stick” to your reel. So you can (and I do) put some mono on my reel first, then tie the braid to that.

Rod and Reel

I don’t really want to get into detail with these two here now. When I started off with softbaiting I bought a $100 rod and reel combo and I still use that rod today. You don’t want a very soft rod that bends easily, but other than that, if you’re anything like me, I’d say start with a basic setup and see whether you’ll like it. I do now have 2 klabs rods, which I find very responsive and fun to use and I have slightly more expensive reels. Still nothing like what some people spend on these things. Maybe I’ll post more on these later, although again, I’m no expert.

So that’s it. In terms of softbait tackle you have your braid tied to a leader, tied to a jighead and a softbait on the jighead. Ideally you have some mono tied to the other end of the braid to help it stay on the reel better.