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Over the last two weeks or so I have had the pleasure of fishing with good friend Ray Ellis in various water ways around Gladstone. For a lot of the time we both fished fly and finished up with similar results. When the fly fishing got tough Ray swapped over to the "dark side" and fished with his spin gear and soft plastics, quickly increasing his hit rate to something like twice the hits that I was getting. The lure that Ray had the best results on was a Zerek hot legs live shrimp. These are an incredible soft plastic. They are very life like in the water and with two interchange weighted hooks being supplied with each live shrimp they can be fished through a wide range of depths.

I have fly fished a lot of soft plastics in the past and so I already had a history of fishing a fusion between fly and lure soft plastics that I could build on. Mostly however those fusions have been for just bream fishing and have been on small paddle tail and grub soft plastics as shown below. Having said that I have fished them in Central Queensland and have had plenty of success with flathead and even one barra using the fusion soft plastic / flies below.

Because the Zerek hot legs live shrimp is so realistic, and has the added benefit of fishing hook up, as soon as left I was down at my local tackle store to get one of these live shrimp so that I could adapt it so that it could be added to my fusion of soft plastic and fly arsenal. At the same time I purchased a pack of Gamakatsu jig hooks, which are the same hook that Zirek have added their weights to.

With just the bare hook I can fly fish the live shrimp in shallow water quite easily and with just a lead shot added to the hook I comfortably fish the Zerek hot legs live shrimp in water up to around 1.2 meters deep. If your never going to use them on spin gear rather than adding a lead shot to a blank hook you can use the hook supplied with the live shrimp by trimming down with sank paper or a file the lead head to a more realistic and fly rod castable size and weight.

These soft plastic / flies are best fished in the same way as fishing a soft plastic on spin gear. I generally fish them using a #8 to #10 weight fly rod depending on the weight of the head and on a fast sinking fly line so that I can get them a little deeper. Let them sink as deep as possible then give the soft plastic / fly a quick lift with the tip of the rod ... with practice you can lift the fly just a few inches. After the lift allow the fly to sink again whilst retrieving the excess line generally with just hand retrieve. Repeat this process for the full retrieve and then lift the soft plastic / fly, recast and repeat the process.

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