Justin from Tackle Tactics TV had the boat to himself on a grey south-east Queensland morning - co-host Declan was off doing lure R&D - and the brief was simple. Run-in to early run-out tide, dirty water from recent rain, and a tackle bag stacked with ZMan micro finesse plastics. Three plastics, one jighead, and a session that hinged on whether the bait would hold up.
It mostly did not. The bream-grade water Justin was looking for never showed. The fish that loved the conditions did.
"One species that does love that dirty, stirred up water is grunt," Justin said, after his first fish - a small spotted grunter - clobbered a 1.75-inch ZMan Micro Goat in bloodworm on a 1/8-ounce TT Lures Headlocks Finesse jig with a number-two hook in bloodworm.
The Micro Goat was the star of the first half of the session. Out of the packet the plastic comes with the two tail sections fused, and the rigging note Justin gave was that they need to be popped apart before the bait kicks properly.
"That little guy out of the packet, we need to remember to grab his two tail sections there and pop that apart so we get that double kicking feet," he said.
The cast was made downwind across half a metre to a metre of water on a coastal flat, with the breeze pushing the boat across structure. Justin worked the bait with a mix of hopping and rolling retrieves, looking for any disturbance - bait flicks, weed beds, rubble.
"Might be a bit of a day of the grunter today," Justin said, holding up a clean spotted grunter still vibrating in his palm. "You can hear him grunting. That's how we got his name."
The fish went on ice for dinner. Spotted grunter are a permitted keeper in the size class shown, and Justin separated them out from the larger barred grunter, which carry visible vertical bars and have different bag rules.
When the first flat shut down on dirty water and no bait, Justin ran. The second flat was cleaner, and the bait switched.
A 2-inch ZMan Guppy Grub in motor oil, on the same 1/8-ounce Headlocks finesse jig with a motor-oil head, came out of the box.
"This guy is what I call the ultimate finesse curl tail," Justin said. "It sits right at the back of that number two in the Headlocks Finesse UV. That's a motor oil colored head and a motor oil colored plastic. So nice UV pop for these overcast low light conditions."
The plastic itself has an internal rib that stiffens the curl tail so it works harder under retrieve. A drop of Procure Ascent in mullet flavour went into the body grooves before the cast.
"I like all the flavors, but it's mullet today and it's the first one I grabbed out of the bag. Just a nice bait fishy scent. Stays on well, even on your pants when you're wiping on your pants. Sorry, Sher Lee," Justin said.
"On this higher stage of the tide, so the tide's pushing in - so these fish will often push right up into the mangrove edges. They can't get in here when the tide's out. So, they come in when the tide is in," he said.
A handful of legal-grade bream came off the curl tail, with each fish hitting hard despite the small profile. Light rain set in through the back end of the session, but the bites kept coming.
"That's pretty cool. We've got a couple of grunt. We got a bream. We're getting some bites on the micro finesse," Justin said.
The takeaway from the session was the pairing logic, not just the lure list. The Micro Goat covers exposed flats with bait absent, working the kicking feet through the column. The Guppy Grub turns mangrove ambush points into legitimate bream water on a high tide. The 1/8-ounce Headlocks finesse jig in size two is the rig that ties them together, with Procure Ascent doing the work of holding fish on long enough to set the hook. A morning that started as a dirty-water washout turned into a clinic on what micro plastics actually do when nothing else is biting.
