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I really enjoying making open/top pour soft plastics and am keen to share with fishonfly and fishonlure members the process of making soft plastics and will progressively add that information to this link.

Alpha Gar
Hammer variant
Alpha prawn
Grub tail prawn

 
Also, to make some off the shelf soft plastics work better for me I have adopted some useful modifications and techniques.

Soft plastic hand pouring
Adding lead to a “weedless” AKA “worm” type hook
Slick rig 130 – competition tuned with stinger or blade
Leader set up – 50lb with fastach connection and in-leader stinger
Adding an up front stinger hook to a paddle tail soft plastic

 
My fishing background before moving to Gladstone in Central Queensland was fly fishing ... I lived and breathed it for 20 plus years and was better than average not only in fly tying but also fly fishing. In fact I qualified 6 times between 1999 and 2018 to represent Australia at the World Fly Fishing Championships, the Commonwealth Fly Fishing Championships and the Oceania Fly Fishing Championships.

I have always maintained that a big factor in my success was making my own flies and having the time and opportunities to learn how best to improve and fish them. In those days we lived on the shores of Lake Jindabyne so I could always go down the front of our house and target Lake Jindabyne trout or head up to the Mowambar or Thredbo rives and test and fish river flies there.

Once we moved to Central Queensland I quickly realized it’s not always practical to fishonfly in Gladstone in particular or Queensland in general … strong winds and fast tidal runs can just stop it being fun and unfortunately there are very few people up here that either fly fish or tie flies. So with limited fly fishing options that gave me plenty of free fishing time to indulge in what has become my current fishing passion which is to fishonlure particularly with soft plastics. Surprisingly much of what I experience and learn when fishing on that “dark side” finds its way into my fly designs and how I tie and fish flies … hence the inclusion of some of that information in this web site. The inverse also applies with snippets of what I lean fishing on the "dark side" influencing new fly designs leading me to improve existing fly recopies.

Probably the biggest element of fly fishing and fly tying that I missed when we moved from fresh water trout country to Gladstone was having enough opportunities to fly fish or to tie flies. That gave me plenty of time to establish a comprehensive ranges of flies for my Central Queensland fly fishing opportunities, time to review and update my flies for other Australian native species including barra, bass and saratoga but there was still a gap ... I missed in particular making a fly and then heading out and catching a fish on it.

In 2019 I decided to compete in the Awoonga Open Fishing Championships with my now great mate Scott. Scott has as a fantastic "dark side" pedigree and he has been very generous in sharing information with me and has help me develop my "dark side" fishing skills. I am still serving my apprenticeship in that regard but that competition was life changing and has helped my fill the gap I mentioned above.

In that competition Scott gave me a soft plastic to try and it worked a dream for me and I caught 4 out of the 9 fish for our two man team and our team finished the comp with 5th place out of 30 teams for that competition.

It turned out that soft plastic was called a "Hammer" and unfortunately they became unavailable in the early days of Covid 19. Not to be daunted by that, I decided to work out how to make soft plastics and to develop my own "top pour soft plastics". That process has had many iterations and progressively developed into a slightly thinner more gar fish like soft plastic ... garfish are a popular food sources for both salt and impoundment barramundi and I called that soft plastic my Alpha Gar.

That was the start in my passion for making top pour soft plastics. That has filled the gap that moving from the trout waters of the Snowy Mountains and consequently competition trout fishing and recreational trout fly fishing ... there are so many new "dark side" fishing opportunities, techniques and baits (particularly soft plastic) that I can dedicate my time and activities to consider.

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