You Can’t Work Them Slow Enough! by Lee Brake

Slowing your lure retrieve down is so simple, yet so effective. This certainly isn't a new topic, yet it makes such a supreme difference to your catch rate that I thought I might reinvent the wheel, so to speak.

These days you see so many anglers who can thread a needle with a lure and are extremely adept at getting deep into the strike zone of a snag, only to wind the lure straight back out again. It breaks my heart.

I remember being a young angler, with my very first baitcaster, working a bank of the Mulgrave River. I was fishing with my father and a friend of his, Dave 'Lumpy' Milson, a well known angler from the region. I was full of youthful pluck and exuberance and I was literally thrashing the water to foam, yet time and time again the fish fell to my more experienced companions.

Exasperated, after watching Dad and Dave pull a pair of feisty barra from deep below a bushy overhang, I asked for some advice. I think my boyish impatience was wearing thin by this stage, so all I received were two firmly spoken words: "slow down".

The tone of the advice offered no room for reply, so with the air blown clean out of my sails, I became mildly sullen and dejected. My zeal failed to return as the day wore on, but late in the afternoon, everything changed.

I put in a long, looping cast that landed with a splash on the very edge on some exposed rock. Rather than retrieve the lure, I turned around to boast about my miraculous cast. I had just delivered a less than modest description of my (fluked) cast when suddenly my arm was yanked backwards in its socket and I was pulled around like a ragdoll on a clothesline.

Turning around, revealed a dark shape charging for the nearby rocks and a hole in the surface of the water that was truly impressive. I fought hard to turn the fish's head and ended up grinning from ear to ear as Dave netted a thumping great sooty for me. It scraped the 50cm mark and remains my PB for this species. The revelation that hit me though, wasn't the size of the fish; it was the fact that it took a still lure. In fact, the lure had been sitting completely motionless for almost ten seconds. From that day on my lures stayed in the strike zone for as long as possible.

On another occasion, I remember being in the thick of the timber on Teemburra Dam. My Dad, Graham, was netting a barra for me only to have his new G Loomis rod buck alarmingly from the floor of the boat. He lunged for it and caught it, as a 70cm fish leapt into the air beside the boat with his lure in its mouth. The fish had snatched the floating lure from its resting place beside the boat.

Ever since, I'm convinced that you simply can't work a lure slow enough. In fact, because of these two incidents, I now pause, twitch and float my lures and I've learnt how to make them back up. Not only has my strike rate improved, but the visual aspect of this kind of fishing has me hooked for life! It really did teach me the golden rule - if in doubt, slow down!