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FISHING THE YEAR���S HIGHS AND LOWS: WEREN���T ALL METEOROLOGICAL BY CAPTAIN ASPARAGUS W ell, last issue for the year, so I thought I would quickly just go over some of the high points of the fishing year for me, you know, stuff like the new toys I liked most, and things that made me go ���hmmmmm...��� Firstly, the new toys. Not a lot new has really raised its head this year. I think the most notable lures I have found would be the tiny little ���3B Crank��� lures from Berkley. Only tiny little lures (perhaps a sad reflection on the sort of fish I manage to catch), these little fellas are just deadly on a whole heap of fish. Probably most significant for us Kiwis would be their troutcatching abilities. I have been using the ���Puppy Dog��� lures, small 30mm lures, casting and trolling on the hydro-lakes here in the Waikato, and to my great satisfaction, they have proven to be just as effective as I thought they would be when I first saw them. They are a quite heavy and dense little lure, so although small, they cast for a good distance, but trolled slowly, these lures will dive to around 10ft (I skip across the bottom when trolling, 9-10ft which is a pretty decent indication of the depth the dive eh!) when pootling along the lakes. The hot colour to me is the bitza, that is pink to any normal person, however they have some other sexy colours too: a gold/black and a silver/black that have all nailed trout. Of course, I took these lures to the islands with me over winter to try on the critters up there, and they were if anything, even deadlier up there. I am very keen to see how they perform here in New Zealand, trolled slowly up the estuaries and over the flat sands off the beaches where I reckon snapper and gurnard may well find them irresistible. In the estuaries I am picking that flounder may even have a crack too, watch this space. Ramona with a nice trout on the Sebile flat shad 50 Professional Skipper January/February 2013 The little Berkley 3B ���Bitza��� puppy Dog lure At the start of the year I kitted out my ���new-to-me��� little boat Side Kick, and was able to fish the lakes like Karapiro again after an absence of several years, and was delighted to find that Karapiro holds a good number of really, quite sizeable trout. The first fish I pulled from the lake was on a Sebile Flatt Shadd, a large lure really intended for snapper here in New Zealand, but with their tight vibrating action and being a decent weight, 9g, they are great for casting and deep swimming action, and these lures have proven to be bloody good little trout lures too. Another lure I have started to seriously reconsider is the ���spinner-bait���. Now, these lures have been around for years. Used widely in the States for fresh water species like bass, spinner baits are really, hugely sexy looking creations. With tassels of pulsating feathers, plastic skirts or whatever, and with a shiny, sexy looking spinner blade flashing like crazy just above the hook, you look at these lures and think to yourself, ���man, that just HAS to kill fish!��� Well, for the last 2 decades I have played with these things all over the show: fresh water here and in the tropics, salt water here and in the tropics, in the fishiest, lure-munchingest places you could imagine, and... Nada. Zip. Zero. I would have been better placed using a piece of carrot or something I reckon. I have just never been able to get these damn things to consistently hook fish, for all their great looks. Why I persisted then and took some little Johnson Spinner baits (from Purefishing) with me up to the islands, I just don���t know. Let���s call it a victory of optimism over experience shall we? Whatever the reason, I am so pleased I did. I don���t know why, but this time in the islands the fish just climbed all over these little lures. Little fish, big fish, they just got nailed! So... once the trout fishing picks up again I am going to give them a fair leerup at the trout and also when soft-baiting in the shallows at Whitianga when I get there after asparagus season is over. If they work well on mangrove jacks ��� as close to a snapper analogue as you can get in the tropics, then surely they must work here as well. Again, watch this space. The most interesting rods I have come across this last year have been some fantastic lightweight, but serious grunt, rods from Kilwell. I have mentioned these plenty of times before