Wrasse

Where to start on this one......? Definitely a fish to target deliberately and fast catching on as a valid quarry for the lure fisherman.

There are possible advantages to fishing for wrasse with lures.

1. From the boat, if you are vertical jigging, you have a good chance of getting the fish away from cover quickly.
2. From the shore, you are not trailing a sinker (unless you are drop shotting, when it should be on a sacrifical link anyway).
3. Lures tend to attract better fish.
4. Deep hookups are uncommon, so C&R is easy.
5. Bait fishermen get very jealous!
6. Time of day is not crucial. They will feed at any time IME.
7. It's great sport and you will get distracted from bass fishing. Honest.

There are some potential disadvantages too;

1. A big wrasse is a real handful on light gear. Much harder work IMHO than a bass of the same size. So prepare to be beaten up if you dare.
2. Wrasse have every SP catalogue memorised and can pinpoint an expensive soft lure from way off before biting the tail off within millimetres of the hook.
3. The lure is usually wrecked when you catch even a half decent fish.
4. You will lose plenty of lures working close to rough ground.
5. Once you work out which lures work, you will have more reason to buy more.
6. See (7) above!

Early season is good from the boat, possibly due to breeding season and/or lack of weed growth giving the fish better sight of lures? I suspect the same time of year will work from the shore but I've caught them throughout the season from shore and boat down here. That might be different further north if water temp is a factor.

Down this way you can catch them on most ground and at anything from a few feet to 60' of water so long as there is structure they can take refuge in (boulders, ledges, cracks etc) within a couple of hundred yards or so. I have taken decent fish off sand beaches 100yds away from the nearest reef. Look for that structure and start there.

Lure wise, Spindle worms, FinS Fish, Mother Eels, XLayers, Sidewinders, Hart Absolut worms, large shads.....they all work. Jig heads will need to be heavy enough to keep the lure near bottom.

Next year should see a lot more wrasse being caught as the SP revolution picks up more steam.

Cheers

Aside from plugging I've caught Wrasse on SP's using 2 main methods from the shore and the skish.

First is drop shot, 2nd is small head, small plastic, drop it down and leave it. Wait, shake it, wait etc.

With both method's, plastics get bitten in half.

I've tried stinger hooks but in wrasse fishing, they are more trouble than they are worth due to the snaggy ground.
On drop shot, the stinger kills the action and makes the bait ride at anything other than that horizontal attitude
needed.

I have used gulp crabs with some success but 3-4" plastics with split, or whip tails have been good.
4" xlayers work superbly well as do small hazedongs. However, I am loathe to recommend them because
you can go very quickly through £25 of plastics. Wrasse don't care whether you have megabass or a cheaper
plastic.

Soft is good for Bass in plastics because they hold on long enough for you to respond.
With Wrasse, I've not found that it matters too much as they attack and bite at the bait.

Wrasse are, by far, pound for pound, one of our best fighting lure species and in 'abundance'
unlike the Bass which are kept a close guarded secret by most.

When diving over reef, sometimes, in fact, most times, I reckon there can be 1 wrasse for every cubic meter
of water and alot of those are real pigs. We've seen em diving well over 8lb, some probably approaching
double figure. And, that is allowing for the magnification too..

Wrasse, love em.

My Wrasse experiences show that..

They are, available ALL year, albeit they slow down in 9 degree water or less. They don't all move away.
All this fish moving thing is myth. It's just Wrasse, and Bass are associated with warm sunshine and
many don't continue to fish for them.

I have found first light to be the very best time to target them. Though, like St Ouen say's , I agree you can catch them
all day long. Only ever caught 1 in the dark, on bread whilst Mullet fishing. Over 5lb though.

Hi

First post here so hello to all - new forum is great, really informative
Got back into fishing in 2008 after being fairly landlocked away in Bristol for 10years (grew up in Guernsey and returned to the island in 2007) - enjoy all sorts of fishing but getting more addicted to lures this time round.

Always happy catching wrasse on lure gear, best this year was well over 4lb in 10ft water and it went like stink. Picked up a middling 3lb'r on the bushwacker last time i went plugging and I thought i'd hooked a 5lb bass the way it took line off the reel.

Thinking back one of my best wrasse ever was about 5.5lb - that was on an 8ft glass spinning rod jigging a 1oz toby lure off Sark in a dinghy when i was about 14. Nearly 20yrs ago now but i still remember watching the lure dancing above the kelp bed in about 10ft of crystal water and seeing it get slammed by the wrasse. Must have been ahead of my time - I spent the next 10yrs using a beach caster and hard back crab as thought it was a fluke!

Not targetted them on softies yet - had most of mine on LC Flash Minnows and found them in all sorts of water (shallowest I have had them is about 2ft).

Cracking fish and with bass getting so sparse we are lucky to have such hard fighters available on lures pretty much all year round.

Cheers
Danny