Hi,

I'm quite experienced with fishing, been fishing for the best part of 15 years or so.
Lots of big Barracudas and small amberjacks (<5Kgs) - preferred method=spinning.

Which brings me to the point of this forum entry.
I know that the seas where I fish are quite famous for very large Jacks (>25 Kgs!), however, i cant seem to be able to hook a monster jack, and people around here are not that interested to provide others with any helpful information about doing so.

I need some general guidelines on what is the best method to spin for Jacks, best locations (in terms of what these fish are generally after), times of year, times of day, weather conditions, techniques (spinning). Any information in general that i can get would be GREATLY appreciated, it seems that Google isn't really up to date on this topic, nor is youtube or any other social media, the information that i have found there seems to be circling around how to land them rather than the technique used to fish them!

Methos

Hi johnjohn. Welcome to Fishing Reminder.

I caught my first fish 49 years ago.

I have never targeted amberjacks. Maybe no one knows because there is no difference between small or large jacks ? Maybe what you are doing to catch small ones is what you need to do for large jacks. I will do some asking and see what I can find out.

As for the best time...just click on Fishing Times (top left of screen).

Hi,

Thanks for your message, Hearing from a heavily experienced angler is always appreciated. I thought about what you said above, maybe fishing for larger Jacks is the same as for smaller ones. I do however have my suspicions on this.

Maybe its because larger (more "experienced" fish) are more suspicious of lures, which probably means that i need to fine tune my technique. However this doesn't make a whole bunch of sense to me, have caught some rather large fish spinning the techniques i use, and fine-tuning them over the years.

Regarding times - the bigger Barracudas generally bite one hour before sunrise and one hour after sunset, obviously lots of variations and obviously not the case for most aggressive fish species - could this (the time) be true for Jacks?

Any advice on this?

Sorry for the slow reply. I have had some internet signal issues today.

As I said before I have never targeted amberjack, nor cootas for that matter. In fact it is pretty rare for me to actually target a particular fish.

If I understand correctly, the jacks you are already catching are of considerable size. You would just like to land a bigger one...

Like any living thing, the younger and smaller the fish the more food it needs. It has to grow and the only way to grow is to eat more food. Once fully grown it only needs food to survive.

Maybe the larger jacks simply don't need to eat as often and can afford to be more picky about what they eat. The larger jacks might be thinking "I am fully grown I don't need to fight for food". So the smaller ones being more aggressive are taking the bait quicker than the older and larger jacks. I have seen this behavior in fish both in the wild and in domestic fish tanks.

If you are catching smaller jacks, then I would think your technique is OK. Maybe try different coloured and different sized lures.

Hello,

thanks for the reply.
The past few days I have raised this discussion with the owner of the tackle shop that we shop from, who happens to be an extremely experienced angler as well.
There were a few things that he suggested:

1) Colors of lures;
2) Refining Walk the dog technique - this seems to be very important for large jacks and bluefish;

I got some Jack Fin Stylo lures the other day and tried them out today (Stylo 210). Amazing lures, and not as hard as i thought to work with. Pretty amazing lures, again i landed a jack today - 3.4 Kg!
This is starting to get frustrating i need to land a monster jack soon

J

Do you do spinning or casting?

I agree with the shop owner...as I stated above, try different colours and sizes of lures.

I don't have any particular style of fishing. I fish according to the location and what fish are in the area.