Two days of stiff onshore weather had kept Tackle Tactics TV duo Justin Willmer and Declan Williams off the water at Redcliffe in Southeast Queensland. When the wind finally backed off in the first week of May, the pair launched in the hope of finding a snapper on the shallow rubble grounds north of Brisbane. The snapper never showed up. Just about everything else did.
"We've had a couple of days of rough weather. So we haven't fished those two days, but we've waited for the weather to come good. And it often fires up the fish in these shallow rubble patches and areas that we're fishing here," Willmer said as the first flathead came over the side on a 3-inch ZMan StreakZ in jelly prawn rigged on a quarter-ounce 3/0 TT Headlockz HD jig head.
What followed was a clinic in adapting to a session that refused to fit a script. Targeting structure, water movement and bait around shallow weed and broken rubble, the pair worked through grassy sweetlip, mid-60-centimetre flathead, spangled emperor, swallowtail dart, mangrove jack-sized big-eye trevally, golden trevally, GTs, late-season tailor and a procession of solid bream around the rocks.
Willmer said the secret on a slack tide was the leg action of the ZMan PrawnZ Elite. He explained that even when the flow drops out and the bite goes off, the prawn imitation continues to deliver bites because of the vibration through the legs and antennae as it wafts down. As the run-out tide kicked in, the action changed with it, and a school of tailor began busting up bait on the surface.
The bigger fish responded to a shift in tactics. Willmer rigged a 10-gram TT SwayBait in silver flash and started drawing eats on the drop. "He's a great Taylor," Williams said as the first proper fish hit the deck. "These early season ones are quite often good fish."
Williams has been a key tester on the SwayBait program at TT, and he was pleased with how the new profile performed across multiple species. He pointed out that the bait works whether you let it fall like a jig and twitch it, slow-roll it through the column, or skip it across the surface, giving anglers the versatility to feed it to whatever turns up. The pair landed two GTs from the same Redcliffe location, which Willmer admitted he had never seen before in that area.
The brim were the standout numbers fish. Working twitchy, fast retrieves over rock slabs and letting the prawn imitations fall into the gaps between rocks, Willmer drew out a series of bream, including a cracker on the opening night colour 2.5-inch ZMan PrawnZ Elite that the angler watched eat the lure right under the rod tip.
The tackle was deliberately light: TT Black Mamba 7-foot 1-3kg and 2-4kg spin rods, 2500 reels, six-pound Platypus Pulse X8 braid and 10-pound Hard Armour FC fluorocarbon leader. Willmer credited the leader strength for keeping fish pinned around abrasive rock structure.
By the time the wind picked up again and the pair pulled the pin, they had logged ten species without their original target showing. "We didn't find the big reef here we wanted, but we'll keep poking around," Willmer said earlier in the session. The summary at the end was simpler. "It's going to be an epic winter for you guys. So grab a bit of gear, get out there and get stuck into a few fish."