Morton Bay's estuary rats copped a workover this week when Tackle Tactics TV hosts Justin and Declan spent a big run-in morning flicking ZMan Drop KickerZ soft plastics around rubble patches, shaded mangroves and a stray boat wreck — a session that produced brim, dusky flathead, a juvenile spangled emperor, Moses perch and even a small snapper on a plastic they say is becoming their go-to for high-flow days.
Declan kicked the trip off with a clean flathead, confirming the morning's plan: start on rock and rubble and shift to the flats as the tide built.
"We came out here looking for a snapper, but we'll take that guy any day," Justin said as the first fish came over the gunwale.
For most of the session they cycled between the 2.75-inch and 3.5-inch versions of the Drop KickerZ, matched to TT Lures' HeadlockZ Finesse jig heads as light as 1/12oz over the flats and up to 1/4oz once they dropped back on heavier water. The tail design — part wedge, part worm — is what made the plastic shine in a tide the bream were clearly feeding in.
"It's a bit of a cross between sort of a wormy profile and a wedge tail, I guess," Declan said of the 3.5-inch variant. "Got that nice wedge tail on it that gives it a real natural bait fish tight swimming action."
The pair fished it three ways on the one rig. Rolled, the wedge tail ticked like a slow-swimming mullet. Slow-hopped through rubble, the plastic sank cleanly and fluttered between jabs. Dead-sticked on the bottom, the long wormy tail kicked and floated independently — which, Justin said, was what triggered the better bream off isolated rocks.
"When I've got that thing moving, twitching and slow-rolling, it's like a bait fish," he explained on camera. "And then when I stop and drop it on the bottom and pause it, that long worm-like tail just gets up and floats around."
With the tide flooding hard over shallow rubble and onto the flats, the duo's best moves were reading current breaks. Bream stacked up behind rocks in the slack side of back eddies; flathead pushed into the shaded lines under mangrove fringe. A surprise flush of colour came off one patch of shade when a juvenile spangled emperor — not a species most bream fishers expect on a finesse plastic — hit a worked 3.5-inch version.
"They have absolutely beautiful colours on them and they are getting pretty thick in Morton Bay," Justin said.
By the middle of the session the bite had shifted to trees. The hosts described flicking 1/8oz heads under mangrove foliage, letting the plastic sink twitchy on slack line, and watching schools of bream follow it to the tip of the rod. That was where the biggest brim of the day fell — a solid shiner-coloured fish that drilled the plastic as it dropped past a shaded trunk.
When the north-easterly kicked up and pushed them off the flats, they shifted back to the river, finding a rubble-and-wreck combination on the way home that produced another flathead off a quarter-ounce head and blood-worm coloured 2.75-inch plastic.
"Big tide today, big high tide, and it just, we haven't really cracked a pattern," Justin admitted. "So we've kind of just been running and gunning, hitting a few spots."
The takeaway for Morton Bay and east-coast estuary anglers is one of tackle simplicity: a single plastic in two sizes, fished on a finesse jig head weighted to suit each bit of structure, covering rubble, flats, wrecks and mangroves without a lure change. On a big tide, that versatility counts.
