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Plastisol is a high quality liquid soft plastic that is Phthalate free and is the common base material for most soft plastic lures.

Lures made of this material should not be stored with lures based on TPE material such as Zman's proprietary TPE material called "Elastec or other TPE material and other TPE materials such as Chasebaits or Castaic lures shown below.

If plastisol based soft plastics are stored with either Elastec or TPE based lures those lures and the plastisol lures will melt on become disfigured.

Consequently I keep my plastisol based lures in one lure box and have separate lure boxes for each of my Elastec and TPE based lures.
 

PADDLE TAILS

Paddle tail soft plastics are my go to starting point lure when fishing for barramundi. From all the different types of lures the paddle tails, well at least the good ones as described below, have an swimming action that barra often home in on. Retrieves can be at various speeds but my preference is a slow roll, sometimes the slower the better. Barra will regularly follow just inches behind working out what it is. Throw in a pause of just a second right up to say 20 seconds and that is often all it takes to convert the follow into a strike.
 

Alpha Gar – top pour soft plastic These are big successful soft plastics for big barra. I make them in just 4 colours and fish them in Awoonga Dam which is of course a freshwater impoundment. I also fish them in coastal barra waters including Gladstone Harbor and the Narrows.

 

Castaic-jerky-j-swimbait-5 The Jerky J Swimbait 5inch is the little brother of the 7 inch version. It’s a great lure to employ at those times when barra are looking for smaller baits or when smaller baits that land softly are required.

 

Castaic Jerky J Swimbait 7 inch The Jerky J Swimbait 7" is one of just a handful of soft plastics I rely on when Barramundi fishing in competitions. Predominately this is a dusk, dawn or full moonlight soft plastic.

 

Berkley Powerbait – Hollow Belly Powerbait hollow belly soft plastics are available in 5 inch and 6 inch versions and I use them for both weedless and jig hook presentations. The four colours that I use are: Tennessee shad Hitch Bone shad Blue gill Weedless hook presentations In those cases The reason for that is that they are indeed hollow and so when a barra munches on them there is little resistance in squashing the lure and exposing the weedless hook and thus enhancing the chance of a hook up

 

Slick rig 130 – competition tuned with stinger or blade I have progressively modified the Slick rig by reducing the internal weight so that it swims mid water, have modified the tail so that it swims better at a slow speed, added a subtle rattle to make it easier for barra to detect the lure and finally have added either a spinner or a set of trebles under the lure to induce and convert more hits to hook ups.

GRUBS

Grub tail prawn This is a hybrid of two very different types of lures ... a prawn imitation and a grub tail soft plastic. Both those types of lures have their place but I have to say that this combination, my grub tail prawn, has earned a place in my tackle box as a favourite when targeting scroungers such as saltwater barramundi, fingermark, blue salmon and king salmon, grunter, mangrove jack, flathead, bream and of course rock cod as well as pelagics such as trevally and queenfish. Grubs is a generic term often applied by fly fishers to describe the lava of terrestrial insects such as beetles, moths and butter flies, grass hoppers and crickets. They often find themselves unwittingly in the water and on the trout’s menu.

 

Hard Rock Grub This just one of the Happy Rock softies that is a credit to its designer Trev Burgess who died in a boating accident on Lake Awoonga a few years ago. He gave me my fist pack of his Grubs a couple of years before that horrible day and I have been using them ever since. I rig it up weedless in two ways. The first is on a 5/0 Owner Flashy swimmer ... this can be fish as you please but the original retrieve that Trevor described to me was a very slow roll. An alternative is to rig it on a 5/0 Owner twistlock to which has been added a few turns of lead wire that has been well coated with a couple of layers of red nail polish.With such a small amount of weight this softy can be fished really slowly with the tip of the rod imparting gust a few twitches.

 

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