The thought of changing to lures can be daunting for those who have always fished for flathead with bait. The range of lures is immense, so where do you start?

Read any article in fishing magazines and everyone is dropping names of various brands, styles, colours and weights, adding more confusion. So let’s keep it simple and try and get you your first flathead on a soft plastic lure. You’ll need a couple of things to get going:

I use a 7’0” graphite rod suited for lines of 8-12lb, matched with a 2500 size reel. These rods and reels are available at several different price points. Fill the reel with 10lb braid, ensuring you load the line on the reel tightly, so it doesn’t slip on the spool. Ten or 20 metres of monofilament line wound on as backing under the braid is a good idea that prevents the braid slipping.

Why braided line? Well, it’s much thinner so it has less resistance when casting and sinking through the water. Its low-stretch properties offer you a greater feel, too. You might think 10lb is a bit light but most braids usually break higher than the rating and 10lb-plus is more than enough to handle flathead.

Attach to the end of the braid a couple of metres of 15lb or 20lb fluorocarbon leader material. This protects against rough seafloor, the flathead’s abrasive teeth and so the coloured braid is not attached directly to your lure.

It’s worth making mention here of why some of what we talk about is in metric terms and the other imperial. That’s because most of the tackle we are talking about is made primarily for the USA market and arrives into Australia marked that way, so it’s easier for me to tell you what you will read on the products in tackle stores, rather than convert it and starting confusion.

You attach a soft plastic lure to what’s called a jig head, which is a weighted hook made for this purpose. For South-East Queensland, jig head weights of ¼ and 3/8 ounce heads will cover most scenarios and can also be used on the shallow bay reefs.

The jig head hook size should be from 3/0 to 5/0, depending on what size lure you are using. Flathead have big mouths and even small fish will take a big lure. Ioften fish with a four-inch‘shad’ pattern and catch plenty of undersize fish on these, as well as big fish.

A shad pattern is a fish shape with a flat paddle tail, somewhat like a herring in shape. The paddle tail starts a nice wriggling action that resembles tail movement of a bait fish.Of late we have been doing well on the 4” Tsunami Shad in the Clear Orange Belly pattern.

To catch flathead you need to cast and retrieve with a slow lift-drop-and-wind method. I use this technique because flathead, while they are hunters, will often lie in ambush on the bottom, waiting for prey to pass by. Flathead will more often than not hit the lure on the drop, as it sinks down, so you need to keep concentratingso you don’t miss the strike or tap of a fish hitting the lure.

After a few trials you will soon work out the correct retrieve technique so you no longer drop too quickly—resulting in a heap of slack line—nor retrieve the lure too quick.

The hardest part,if you have always bait fished, isoften the change in tactics to becoming the hunter and actively seeking out where the fish maybe.The obvious places—such as weed banks, gutters, drop-offs and sand banks—are all likely to hold flathead. Working out where and when flathead will be at these locations is the challenging part.

Fish move out into deeper areaswhen the water is clear, so you may have to occasionally change where and how you fish. If many baitfish are up in the shallows, that’s a good spot to cast towards. On several occasions I’ve spotted the flick of a few bait fish in ankle-deep water, cast to that spot and immediately hooked up on flathead.

You tend to get more fish when you are actively hunting your quarry. You also gain a better understanding of the areas you fish and where and when fish will come. You might have to start by fishing the whole tide a few times before you work out the best part of the tide to fish.A whole day’s fishing—a small problem, you’d agree!

A general rule: the last half of the run out is the best as the baitfish are moving off the shallow flats and into the slightly deeper water. I’ve found on the high tide that fish are more spread out and you need to cover a larger area to find good fishing.It’s not just in estuaries that you can fish this way. Surf gutters can also be productive.

Keep quiet when working the shallows from a boat and if wading, keep back from the water’s edge when you cast. Be persistent and it will all click into place. They you’ll see why so many anglers enjoy the soft approach to chasing flathead.