Sydney Offshore – Micro Sized Dolphin Fish and one free jumper

[Scent Blazer Lures]

Hey all, we went off shore last week for a quick afternoon trolling session. Did our usual route Whale Fad, Manly Hydraulics then we headed North East. We couldn’t find Manly Hydraulicsagain,itmust drift a fair way off its mark at times.

Water was really blue and warm just 200 metres off North Head, so we put the lures straight out, the fish could be anywhere in that water. Ran a couple of our Scent Blazer trolling lure chains, a couple of bigger trolling lures and one small pink prototype lure which we are currently calling an“Atom”, it’s only about 3 inches long. We put pilchards and skipjack tuna in the bait chambers of the lures’, we got a skipjackon our last outing that we kept for bait.

We were sounding schools of bait the entire trip. Hooked a few a Dolphin fish, between the Whale and Manly Hydraulics on the lures chains, but they kept coming off, so we changed down to smaller trolling lures to try and get a better hook up.

I even cut the skirt off one of the lures to make it look smaller and I put a few mismatching beads inside and called it “The FrankenLure”, just a weird looking thing. We finally ended up catching some Dolphin Fish, they were really, really small, 1lb or less.

We got around 6 hook-ups in the entire session and landed 3 very small Dolphin Fish. 2 of them were caught on The Franken Lure. We also got another hook-up on the lure down rigged on the Troll Pro but it couldn’t break the rubber band off. That Dolphin Fish looked a little bit bigger. We got to use weaker rubber bands when we down rig on the camera ?. We got excited when we saw a free jumper about 3 miles directly North from Manly Hydraulics around Long Reef Wide, it was about 500 metres in the front of boat. We trolled towards it but no hook-up, it may have been full of small Dolphin Fish.

One notable thing we found when we looked at our underwater camera footage this time. Only single Dolphin Fish were coming up on the spread, in the last month or so, there where big schools of Dolphin Fish up on the spread. We also go some underwater footage of a massive school of what looks like some sort of small trigger fish(leatherjacket) while the boat was stopped toreel in a small Dollie. Some of Dolphin fish we have been catching in the last month are sometimes full of small trigger fish, maybe we should use leather jackets fillets inside the lures to match the hatch.

Does anyone know what kind of fish they are?

Peter – SB Lures

[Dave G]

Hi Peter, I have never used a scent blazer only other brand lures and i have great success with them. Do scent blazers actually out fish other trolling lures?

[Shanemills]

Mate scent blazer lures are pretty good I have some and they are worth it especially with the raider discount. They have a great action in the water to. Keep the pics coming guys great shots to.

[Scent Blazer Lures]

Hi Peter, I have never used a scent blazer only other brand lures and i have great success with them. Do scent blazers actually out fish other trolling lures?

Yeah for sure. This is what we have found, there will always be days when it doesn't matter what you are running, the fish are hungry and aggressive and they will take anything and on those days our lures will work just as well and better than other trolling lures. But the reality is you don't get those kind of days every time you go fishing, most days the is fishing slower. If you had an underwater camera you would find that fish are coming up on your lures and swimming off them without striking a lot of the time. That's where our lures come into the picture, we put real bait inside the lures so they taste and smell like the real thing. Basically we are ticking that extra box by having the lures taste like a real fish and we have honestly found that more often than not they will strike at our lures and not just swim off them.

If you have time, check out this link it explains how we came up with the idea for lures and how we tested them. We basically worked out what was working and what wasn't by getting years of underwater footage.

http://www.scentblazer.com/FishingAdvice/WhyuseScentBlazer.aspx

Also we have some recent underwater footage of us fishing for Dolphin Fish. To prove a point we ran one of our lures without any bait inside behind the camera for around 2hrs around the FADs and we got footage of heaps of Dolphin Fish coming up behind the lures, looking but not striking. We pulled the lure in and filled it with pilchards, then continued filming, in quick succession Dolphin Fish started smashing and hooking up on the lure, basically the bait was the difference between turning them from lookers into biters. We are going to compile a video about it soon.

I recommend you run one or 2 of them in your spread filled with bait. On any given day it could be the difference between getting a fish and getting nothing. Even without the bait inside they swim like a normal trolling lure, they catch fish even without bait inside.

Edited February 23, 2014 by Scent Blazer Lures

[Scent Blazer Lures]

we did a test a couple years back as well. we ran just a bait chamber with pilchards inside against a very popular lure that's commonly used off Sydney, we literally ran them side by side a few metres apart. The bait chamber rig got 3 quite decent dollies that day, the "popular" lure got zero. I think that says a lot about the value of having the bait inside in terms of getting the fish to strike

Edited February 22, 2014 by Scent Blazer Lures