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| just couldnt resist a vent right skirt, took a dozen swipes before being hooked |
The pinnacle of game fishing has to be landing a billfish. The explosive speed and awesome aerobatics display while hooked is something to behold. Seeing one dance along the water with your skirt in it's mouth really gets the heart pumping.
Being a first timer chasing these I was quickly confused with the amount of skirts on hand to chase these. You are faced with a wall of different brands when walking into a shop to buy one, but what works well? Some of the skirts in selected shops can easily run over $100 AUD each and that's before you start putting hooks onto them.
Thankfully there is a new skirt on the market that's easily half price of most others and works just as well, in fact better I believe as I found out. Vent Right skirts are machined aluminum heads, anodized in various colours and come with basically any combination of coloured skirts you can think of. Even a novice like me can use them, and landing both marlin I hooked on them just proves how easy they are to use and how much the fish loooove them.
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| solid heads with Hawaiian UV skirts |
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| one of the many different types of jet head skirts available |
After taking a heap of these up on a recent trip to exmouth it was clear the pelagics were definately in favor of these over everything else we ran. When you have a spread of four lures being a Vent Right skirt, a skirted Ballyhoo, a Richter skirt and a Rapala SXR14 diver and 80% of the hookups over the trip on different species are on one brand of lure the proofs in the pudding as they say.
With a variety of heads and sizes available in the range and being either jet heads or solid there is one for practically any type of fishing you like doing. We found trolling the jet headed ones around the 7-8kt range to be the most effective. They would shoot water out from the holes then darting back under the water again, popping back up and doing it all again you can see why they are so effective as any fish in the vacinity would come and see what the commotion is. Some of the larger heads have even been tested at speeds of over 20kts and still perform excellently with no rolling or spinning of the lure, all you need is to bump into a fish fast enough to catch it.
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| even the bycatch can be great fun |
It's not just billies these work great on but a whole range of pelagics. They have accounted for dolphin fish, Spanish mackeral, longtail and yellowfin tuna just to name a few and with many more to be added to that list. Even when you do bump into a mackie or wahoo and it tears the skirt to bits unlike other types of skirts where it's destined for the bin, with these it's just a matter of pulling off the old and replacing it with a new one by just sliding it onto the grooved edges that secure them on. From only a short time being out these have definately made a mark as one of the must have lures in my tackle box when planning a next trip.
So Definately go and check these out next time your in the market for a skirted lure.
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Tight lines
Reece
