Top 4 tips for catching kingfish

More numerous these days in Victorian and South Australian waters, improved electronics have certainly made finding them easier, but you’ve still got to catch them and they can be a bit finicky at times.

A favourite target of the NSW DPI Game Fish Tagging Program with more than 39,000 tagged thus far, tagging results have revealed that kings generally don’t roam too far from their release point.

There are some exceptions to this rule, with 97 fish recaptured more than 200nm away. The longest was a straight line journey of 866nm from Port Augusta, SA, to Jumpinpin, Queensland, (but considerably further by sea).

The hot bite is usually on dawn, so have the bait sorted the night before if possible. Decidedly old school, but a washing basket hung off a wharf with a house brick to keep it out of sight was a good way of saving time to be catching fish, not bait, during that crucial bite window.

Throwing a stickbait off heavy spin tackle on dawn is a modern technique and very successful too, which can be done quite successfully in conjunction with other techniques, even trolling. Not only are the surface strikes explosive, but stickbaits seem to produce a better standard of fish. In more tropical waters, you can also expect Spanish mackerel, so a short length of single strand wire ahead of the lure is wise.

Kingfish are a nosy species, which is why they often paddle about in plain sight just checking things out, frequently in quite shallow water. Just because you can see them doesn’t mean they’re easy to catch though!

Commercial fishermen at places like Montague Island used to employ a big chrome jig to provide weight and flash, with a metre of heavy mono to a single or double ganged hook baited with squid. Yo-yoed through the school, it was deadly effective. Does anybody still use this technique? Probably not cool enough, but it would certainly work.

A cheaper but equally effective alternative is strips of wine cask bladder tied to a barrel sinker.

Kings love squid more than almost any other bait, whether live, dead or in strips. Squid fishing has really taken off in recent years, with a multitude of jigs in different sizes and a kaleidoscopic array of colours. We have certainly moved on from the days of three You Zuris in pink, blue or green, fished off a 30lb handline!

If the squid are inspecting jigs but proving wary, try an old fashioned squid jag, fished with a whole pilchard. This can be cast and retrieved like a jig, or propped under a bobby cork and left to its own devices while the jigs are worked.

Squid size can vary from day to day, so a sliding top hook rig like the one shown hereabouts is a good move. If fishing to IGFA rules and/or seeking an untroubled release, replace the treble with a single hook.