TROLLING PRISMS

The area I was catching most of my fish from was now swamped with anglers casting lipless crank baits and I felt a change of location was needed. We decided to troll the Prism Murrins to our chosen destination as it is an electric only dam anyway. We didn’t get more than fifty metres closer to where we where going when one of our lures got smacked by yet another cod in the mid 50’s which was once again quickly measured and released by the marshalls. I won’t go onto bore you with the details of every fish we caught during the competition but it did not seem to matter whether we cast, jigged or trolled the Prism Murrins the Murray cod and golden perch that weekend just couldn’t get enough of them.

The one thing I would like to point out about my experiences trolling these lures for Murray cod is the fact that we catch far more fish by using the drag and drop technique. This simple technique consists of constantly dragging of the lure forward with your rod tip around a metre then dropping it back around the same distance. When you troll this way you must make sure to keep your line taught at all times as most of the hits I’ve found have been as you’re dropping your lure back, so make sure you don’t drop the lure back with loose line or you will miss a lot of hits.

Trolling like this with the rod in your hand also allows you to move the lure out of the way of snags, or to speed it up over rough country.

The dragging forward action entices the fish up to inspect the noisy intruder while dropping it back into their faces seems to be too much for them and this is normally when your lure gets smashed. We found using this technique that the majority of the fish had taken the lure well and truly into the back of their mouths making for very solid hook ups.

This technique is my preferred way of trolling these lures for Murray cod but we have had plenty of experiences on my local waterways running a second rod in a holder and just let the Prism Murrins do their thing. Quite often the rod in the rod holder gets its fair share of the fish.

The author’s better half Sharon with one of the beautifully marked Timberlake cod that she caught whilst trolling a Prism Murrin during the competition.

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