Black Magic Tackle Whiting Snatcher review

I’m now at the stage with my whiting rigs where I can almost make them in my sleep. Why, then, would I want to go out of my way to pay for a commercially made rig?

Yep, curiosity got the better of me so I forked out for a couple of packets of pre-made Black Magic Tackle Whiting Snatcher rigs to see if they would improve the odds of me snaring a good feed.

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These are set-and-forget rigs ready to roll straight out of the packet. Just attach the swivel to your line, add a sinker, bait up, cast, and haul in the fish.

The Whiting Snatchers show how globalised some corners of the lure-making business have become. Black Magic Tackle, a New Zealand-based company, has the whiting rigs assembled in China using Japanese-sourced circle hooks and flurocarbon. They're then exported to Australia.

The rigs are available for around $12 as either two single hooks so you can use a running ball sinker to present the bait and lure, or as a single paternoster rig with a pair of hooks. In contrast, a simple pre-packaged paternoster whiting rig with more traditional long-shank hooks, and red plastic highlights and beads, and a sinker sells for as little as $5.

You can also choose among a number of colour themes for the skirt; we went with Mini Pilly that included a red luminescent bead ahead of the circle hook and more green in the skirt.

The packet also comes with two 01 hooks on 5kg line, and a single silver swivel at one end.

We went with the paternoster rig, mainly because in our experience the lower bait usually ends up feeding crabs and undersize flathead while the upper one catches all the fish.

I bought two rigs so that I could run two rods; you need to move around a bit to find the whiting, and once you’re in among them it pays dividends to have lines in the water.

It’s easy to attach the rig to your line, but attaching the sinker created a bit of a problem.

I like to match my sinkers to the conditions, so I’ll always attach a surgeon’s knot to the end of the line so I can easily swap to a heavier sinker if the current is stronger than I thought.

The pre-prepared rig only had a short tail to attach the sinker, so once the surgeon’s knot and loop were in place, the lower hook was sitting lower than I wanted it to – right at crab, rather than fish, height.

I’d been tipped off about a good fishing hole in behind Rigby Island on the Gippsland Lakes in eastern Victoria.

A number of gutters cut through shallow stretches of seagrass and feed into a channel. The whisper was that everything from monster 50cm whiting to salmon and even kingfish counted in the regular catches here.

I’d decided to dress the Whiting Snatchers up with pipis. My fat fingers and the steep backward incline of the tip of what is a smallish hook made hooking up the bait was a bit challenging.

Did they work? Yes. An outgoing tide was bringing a school of salmon back out the channel, and I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The hooks work best with a soft-tipped rod, and the tip of the rod held high. This allows the circle hook to work its way into the side of the fish’s mouth as it takes the bait and turns away – you don’t need to set it once the fish strikes.

Over the course of about 20 minutes, I came close to bagging out, pulling in fish with one rod and then dropping in the second one while I unhooked the fish and re-baited.

I even had several double hook-ups, justifying the choice of the paternoster rig over the Whiting Snatcher rig using single hooks.

Because the hooks grab the corner of the mouth, you don’t get the deep-swallowed hook-ups that are difficult to detach from the fish, so getting them on ice and the line back in the water is fast.

It’s difficult to say if it was just the pipis weaving their magic on the salmon, or a combination of the whiting rig and the bait.

What counted was that when the action got hot, the Black Magic Tackle Whiting Snatchers performed well under pressure, delivering a couple of good feeds of fish for the family.

Just the rig alone did not catch any fish.

The rigs survived the day very well, so I’ll definitely use them another time.

However, if I do buy them again I’d probably put a snap shackle at the end of the line to take a sinker rather than waste a big part of it on a looped surgeon’s knot.