Need help on haruan

21

Hi all,

Just got back from my fishing trip.
My experience is that the place is full of grass, weeds and snags

My 7’0 10-20lb rod, 2000 series reel and 20lb braided line have no match with my kaki’s 8’0 rod and 3-4000 series reel.

Got quiet a few haruan snagged using my rod but when my kaki lend my their spare rod, I landed most of the haruan with min. effort.

But then again, casting with their set-up is really a pain in the arm.

Is there any set-up/method/skill that I can use other that those heavy rod and reel, my arm still hurts…

22

A 6-foot Shakespeare Contender heavy action will do the trick and be much lighter. The action is more important than the length.

No need big big reel one la. How much line does one need fishing a hole like that? A big reel makes your setup heavier, contributing to the strain.

Put a fat ball sinker to the line right after the snap swivel and pegged the sinker in place with the tip of a toothpick. Bring lots of toothpicks. You can use bullet sinkers too but they are more expensive. Losing your rig is very common in such situations so you want to use cheap sinkers. Bring lots of sinkers. When the sinker is pegged down, it will help your cast tremendously. Plus, your weighted rig will easily sink down through the weeds.

After a few months of continous casting like that, your muscles will have condition themselves. The pain is only temporarily.

23

But where u fish? lake? or estate a.k.a drain [:p]…

For me, I usually fish around estate… i’m using 6’ and 20lb if i not mistaken. and reel… normal one will do la… but the most importantly, my rod is not really heavy.

I tried other rod which my brother have. Is quite heavy than what i’m using now.. seriously after few throw, hmmmn.. my muscle started to feel pain.

Anyhow… most you feel fishing in lake or estate feel more better and challenging?
For me estate percentage of getting fish are more higher than lake.. hahahaha

24

The techniques are different lor.

Canal fishing in estates are really fun. A good deal of accuracy needed. Light lures with fine presentation.

In lakes, you still need accuracy, and also power for distance.

25

and some more most important thing our luck.. ha ha ha…
Ok, we like keep talking about lure and bait and those equipment…

i think, why not we share our normal fishing spot for haruan?

26

I never fish haruan for a lonnnng time oredi.

But if I feel like it, I go to Kundang (not tow foo) or Sekinchan area. And I almost always get haruan when I walk into any paypond with just a spinnerbait.

27

I just went to batang berjuntai with my fren… there is strike but no fishin are caught… cause is too excited when got a fish strike and i pulak go to strike back… but i saw the fish are quite huge… hmz.. wasted…

ya, normally you guy using frog started to cast from deep till top or keep casting on deep level?

Myself, normally i will start to cast once the frog touch the water and i will keep the frog on top of the water. Cause is kinda fun when saw the fish come with full speed and whack the bait… Is kinda great when seeing the fish come from end of the bushes and go over ur frog and strike with full speed… hah ha ha ha…

28

On 2nd May ( a Hot Blue Sky afternoon ) 4 of us went to batang berjuntai area, an old abandon Logging stream, the water was blackish and quite swift. One of my friend caught a 600gm Bujuk while 2 others caught 5 nos. ranging from 400g to 1.3 kg haruan. practically I don’t like fishing haruan in flowing stream.Only manage to caught 1 haruan (600gm). The trick i think in this condition is keeping casting in a certain spot ( stagnant/slower flowing area and attract the surrounding area Haruan to your bait. I had lost a few takes, probably these haruan didn’t swallow the frogs yet, strike only when you feel the fish is tucking in the frog/bait with your finger feeling the line.

29

Fearless, thanks for the tips.

The place I fish is an ex-lumber area where a big area of lower land have been flooded with slow mowing blackish water.

The snag both above and below the water is horrible but the haruans are there.[:D]

Is just that sometimes, in fact most times, those action of the haruan are quiet far out. Having to cast that far and acurate is already difficult and having to bring the haruan in through those sangs is a real challange, which makes it all the more fun, I think.

30

ikanbilis,

That kind of fishing condition is damn bloody tough. I would only like to fish it if I had to carry makan by catching haruan.

Forget about the distance of the cast with the snags above you. Use rod less than 6ft. Small reel. Try to look for a place where you can wade out as far as you can while remaining general dry. (Get those pasar rubber boots. Wear socks.) Cast to a good looking spot and twitch the froggie right there for at least a minute.

Wow, the bujuk catch must be great, kenchen.

31

Ikanbilis bro… check out Marlin’s postings on Soft Plastics. Haruans love them.

32

afro_d,

Read that, bought quiet some different types of soft plastic, tried it but up till, now only manage to catch 1 juvenile haruan.
Maybe the presentation is not right [:(]

33

attee, wehh!!!

bro ikan bilis, you might need to print all of marlin’s posts and keep it for good reading. i did that, but reading only won’t help as much. i actually need to see how he does it but still did not have the opportunity. there is even in the malay section about the use of spinnerbait (janggut) and they are catching whole lot of haruan but i still to catch one using janggut. i follwed marlin’s tips on SPs and i am luckier with SPs on haruan. nothing on janggut, yet. zilch, nada, yilek, boh…

i think i’m luckier that perak tengah still has many areas where we can enjoy haruan, but they’re getting more and more inaccessible now. lesser roadside canals, nowadays. agriculture getting lots of emphasis.


= “Angler Team Mangkor” =
“Team Mangkor U4 - 2006”

“If you tell what people want to hear, they will listen.”

“Be grateful, don’t be a great fool”

34

Check out the VCD with this month’s Rod and Line for some real world fishing with plastics. It really is an excellent illustration of many of the techniques I’ve written about. The guys still fish a little fast in some of the areas for my taste and you can slow down way more, especially for Haruan or even use techniques for fishing plastics in situ next to likely cover.

There’s a whole lot more to soft plastics and I’ve been scaling down my gear to some “silly” ultralight stuff with great success. Drop shotting and wacky rigging with very light vanish leaders has increased the number of ways to catch these fish in different conditions.

I didn’t like Faiz Karim’s “Soft Plastic rigging the Malaysian way”, however, and I found many of his observations to be in complete contrast to mine (sorry Faiz!). In particular the need to strike quickly is just plain wrong in my experience. Haruan will often hold on to a plastic for ages and only let go at the last minute if you have not set the hook properly. I can feel a R+L article on more finess plastic techniques coming on! They really are deadly effective on Haruan and they are my first choice bait in most Haruan situations.

You can also scale back your tackle and terminals from the more traditional industrial strength gear often used. Spend a bit more on smaller and stronger fine wire hooks. Get rid of those huge swivel clips and revamp your rigging techniques and you should be able to pull plastics through some unbelieveable snaggy terrain. You’ll also increase your strike rate tremendously with more finesse.

35

Hi Marlin,

Excellent advice. Just back from a day of haruan fishing in a remote area. The size 2 snap swivel is now getting out of fashion. It gets snagged more often in the weeds than helping to put the bait where you want it to be. Much time wasted trying to jerk the bait out of the weeds.

This may probably be due to light tackle being used nowadays and the softer tip of the rod is unable to pull the terminal tackle to enable it to skip above the weeds.

Replaced it with a miniature 20 lb. Rosco and that makes a whole world of difference. When you get rid of the snap swivel, then you need to put back some weight to your terminal tackle which I did with a thin strip of lead wrapped around the shank of the hook and securing it with Araldite.

With a light weight baitcaster and braided line, the bait still goes the same distance and sink down just as fast.

36

There are many ways to add weight to a plastic in “snagless” ways. The soft “nail” weight shoved inside the plastic and completely buried inside it gives added distance, added sink rate and can alter the action and the way a plastic glides or sinks. Home made efforts at Texas rigging isn’t very good in the snags unless you use a bullet worm weight pegged against the head of the plastic. A bullet or barrel sinker is almost guaranteed to snag. Using just a hook and a plastic is also economical if you happen to loose a few. Plastics are cheep and readily available. They also keep indefinitely, unlike live frogs.

Generally, when its very snaggy I’ll use an unweighted plastic and an EWG offset worm hook and I’ll skin it back into the plastic on the top. The hook acts as a keel under the bait, letting it slide over pretty much anything and the hook can be buried (skinned) as deeply as needed to make it snagless. The deeper the hook point is skinned back, the more weedless the rig, but the harder it will be to drive the hook home, even with fine wire hooks.

In deeper water or where you need to penetrate thick grass to get down to the water, one of the most effective ways to fish snagless is to use the sled head with the screw thread soft plastic keeper behind the head. This makes it almost impossible to pull the plastic off the hook, either in a snag or with fish pulling it. The hooks are very sharp and have good penetrating power and I can guarantee you’ll not bend one of these!

Any of these methods can be fished over the top of a snag with the bait dangling in the water, just wiggling in situ, like a surface dropshot method! The plastic will easily slide over tree branches and roots but obviously if you hook a fish deep in the snags, you do need slightly beefier gear to get it out, but you don’t need the elephant hunter type massive rods and reels typically used in these situations. GSP braid will cut through softer vegetation and weeds much better than monofilament does. Lighter gear can also be fished with much greater accuracy, slipping baits into tiny pockets and holes in bankside cover where a more wayward cast might end in trouble.

The type of plastic doesn’t seem to matter too much and Haruan will take most plastic baits. Even 5" plastics are not too large, but there are days when smaller plastics will get bit when larger ones tend to be ignored, but usually a decent sized bait is the way to go. Colour does seem to be important on some days and in clear water I’ll use natural colours, while in coloured water I’ll use darker colours like “root beer”, “motor oil” and black. Match the colour of the water is a good rule. Greenish water, “pumpkin seed” colours are good, tannin stained water and “root beer” is good, but again, Haruan tend to not be too fussy. The key ingredient seems to be presentation.

Try scaling down and using a little finesse and I’m sure you’ll be surprised at the results. It does make a difference, even to aggressive feeders like Haruan. They do get put off by heavy gear and carelessly rigged baits. You’ll get more bites with a more natural presentation. Beef up your gear only when conditions absolutely force you to, which in my experience is a lot less often than you’d think.

37

auuoooccchh!!!

here we go again… marlin never ceases to amaze me with his SP postings. i followed most of his advice and managed to land haruans with SPs. i have no problem with SPs but i still luckless with spinnerbaits. no fish so far with SBs


= “Angler Team Mangkor” =
“Team Mangkor U4 - 2006”

“If you tell what people want to hear, they will listen.”

“Be grateful, don’t be a great fool”

38

Marlin,

Thanks for the excellent tips on soft plastics…and nice catch there too!

39

Marlin,

Thks for the info on soft plastic, and the pictuer too.

Could you please elaborate more on ‘presentation’.

Have read most of your topics on soft plastic, have bought myself quiet some variaties of SP and hooks as well, gone fishing with it for almost 20-30 outings but till now, sad and shy to say that only manage to catch ONE haruan on SP [:(][V]

40

Ikanbilis, yes, I can elaborate if you’ll allow me some time to prepare something. I’ve always said that mechanics for fishing soft plastics is a tackle “system” in that the rod, reel and line at one end (the dry end) and the leader, jig head or hook and the soft plastic at the other (the wet end) are all part of the “system”. These bits are all easily described and illustrated.

Presentation is the next part. It’s what you do with your plastic bait when you cast it out. It’s how you work it or fish it in the water. I think this is the bit the Prof Pacman says he needs more detail on as well. You know what tackle to use, you have the plastic baits and jig heads and you have a pretty good idea on how to rig them. You just don’t seem to be able to catch anything with them.

After 20-30 trips with little to show, I think something must be wrong, especially if you are catching fish from the same locations using other baits. Let me see if I can put something together that might help identify what that might be.

There will always be some overlap in the rigging methods and jig head/hook combinations you use to present soft plastics in different ways for different circumstances. Think of your jig head or hook as a presentation vehicle. Something which allows you to present the soft plastic in a certain way. The way you rig it has to be tailored to how you will present it. If you get the rigging wrong, you’ll be limited in how you can fish the plastic. Once you have that part visualised, the hardest part to get your head around and the thing that I think causes the most difficulty in adapting to soft plastics is the fact that whilst they are lures and have many similarities with other lures, they “can” be, or even “need” to be fished in a different way to other types of lures.

They are similar to other lures in that they require the angler to cast them out and “work” them to impart life and action. Just like hard body lures, you retrieve them. But unlike other lures, they get eaten primarily when the plastic is sinking or paused, not when it’s actually being retrieved.

I know you often impart a jerky retrieve to a minnow or jerk bait and quite often it will get eaten on the pause, but soft plastics carry this even further. You fish them with longer pauses and allow them to coast, glide, sink, wiggle in place and you can fish them in the vertical plane very effectively, not just the horizontal plane. No other lure type combines the potential for fishing both vertically and or horizontally and or “in place” at the same time.

One of the ways to fish a plastic is to cast it out and then just let it sink. Do nothing. It takes a great deal of confidence to let the plastic just freefall through the water, gaining all its action from the supple plastic, the freefall through the water and the way you have rigged it, rather than action imparted with the rod tip. This part of the “presentation” can always be incorporated in the retrieve style, even when fishing some of the more active soft plastic techniques with more aggressive actioned soft plastics.

Unlike other types of lures where a fish hits hard and aggressively and hooks up immediately with the rod tip slamming over, the bites or pick-ups on soft plastics are often very gentle and unless you develop a feel for what you are doing, bites may go unnoticed or undetected. In this respect it’s more like bait fishing than lure fishing and I always think is much more subtle and requires a more delicate touch.

So let me write something about presentation. An hour on the water with an experienced soft plastic user will teach you much more than words ever could, but let me try.