While on a filming mission to gather footage for our in-store seminar series, we managed to get a few lucky aerial shots showing a school of kingfish chasing down one of our Riptide 200mm lures.

During the seminar, we used this footage to show how the fish will react to how you’re working the lure, and what you can do to maximise your chances of nabbing a fish once you’ve got them interested in your bait.

The first clip in this video is a good example of what doesn’t work…

But we do things a bit differently in the second clip, and you’ll see that it results in a solid hook-up.

The first thing you'll notice in both of these videos is that there’s rarely ever just one fish on your lure. Kingfish are a schooling animal, so will almost always be in groups. From the boat or from shore, you may see a bit of a swirl on the surface to indicate you’ve got a follow, and you may see one or two fish follow it to the side of the boat - but it’s a safe bet to assume that there’s considerably more than just one fish interested in what you’re doing. Especially in those first couple of sweeps, so don’t be afraid of having your mates fire a couple of lures into the same general area. A well placed cast into the commotion should see some more hook ups.

In the first 2 seconds of the first clip you can see a fish take a swipe on the Riptide. A few seconds later another one has a shot, neither results in a hook setting, and you can see the entire group begin to turn off the lure, choosing instead to follow it from a distance and appearing much less enthusiastic about having a taste for themselves. Given a few more sweeps of the rod, the lure is swimming nicely and a couple of fish charge the lure before we run out of space and it leaves the water at the side of the boat. No fish on that run, but no worries! We know they’re here and we can send another cast out in that direction.

We do a couple of things wrong in the first clip, which greatly reduce the chances of getting a bite.

No matter how much experience you have, the thrill of seeing a fish on your lure combined with the distractions of filming can sometimes be enough to make you forget proper technique and you start making mistakes. Our first mistake was not paying enough attention to the lure. You can see pretty clearly that we yank the lure out of the fish’s mouth - twice. The right thing to do here would’ve been to chill out a little and let the fish run with the lure for a bit. As mentioned above, the fish clearly become more suspicious of the bait after two failed bites, and from that point forward we’re working to regain their trust - until we run out of space and and have to have a second attempt.

Retrieve speed and length of pause come into play here. Had we slowed the retrieve and allowed more of a pause between sweeps, we may have been able to convert a bite after missing the first two.

Comparing the first clip to the second clip, we can see the sweeps are a bit slower and we leave more of a pause between sweeps, and it results in a solid hook set and the fight begins. You can also see in the second clip that the fish aren’t really charging our lure until we’ve got a few solid sweeps in - this shows how important your swimming technique can be. If your lure is leaving the water or otherwise swimming incorrectly, it can be much harder to trigger the fish into taking a bite.

Simply put, when it comes to technique, you need to keep the following things in mind to help convert a follow into a bite:

Retrieve at a pace that the fish can chase, but don’t sacrifice technique for speed. You need to keep that lure swimming correctly at all times.
Allow a decent pause between sweeps. You can see in the video that the fish will follow your lure on the sweep, then charge in and grab the lure on the pause. This can be tricky to get right, as leaving it stationary for too long may also cause the fish to lose interest.
Pay attention, and when a fish does take your lure, give the hooks a chance to find its mouth. It can be hard to know exactly when (or if) the hooks have set, but as long as you’re not yanking it too hard too quickly, or leaving it too long, you should be fine.

These are all fairly well known tips, there’s nothing ground breaking shown here. But visually seeing how to fish react to you doing the right (and wrong) things whilst top-water fishing is an awesome way to see how important proper technique can be.