About ten years ago I was fishing in the upper reaches of a Transkei estuary with a mirrOlure 7M. I twitched it slowly over a shallow mudprawn bank and was rewarded with a swirl in the water below the lure. This happened numerous times, before I finally hooked a fish and on landing it was surprised to see that it was a spotted grunter.I figured that it was a bit of a fluke and didn’t give it too much thought ater that.Recently a good mate of mine, Chris Schoultz, who lives down in PE told me he is regularly catching spotted grunter on surface lures in the Swartkops river. I decided that I wanted to check it out, so got a cameraman and went down to PE for a few days. We had some amazing fishing, catching around a dozen grunter all on surface lures.
I was interested to note that the grunter were all caught over areas where they were feeding on mudprawn, blowing into the mud to expose the prawn and eject them from their tunnels. Generally in pretty shallow water. The grunter obviously keep a lookout for mudprawn swimming slowly on the surface in areas where they are blowing, and hit them quite aggressively when they see them. The lure needs to be worked extremely slowly, with tiny twitches and pauses in between. The grunter fight hard and are great fun to catch on surface lures. Kudos to Chris for taking the time and effort to figure out how to regularly catch these shy fish on the surface.
The bigger grunter were caught on Rapala X-Rap Walk 9cm lures, while a lot of smaller fish were caught on Original Floating Rapala’s 7cm. These would be cast out and allowed to float, with just the odd small twitch to cause them to do a small dive, then float back up, sending out a few ripples as they broke the surface. The trick is not to cast the lure directly over the feeding fish, but to allow it to drift over them. These fish are very shy, and fishing for them on artificials needs lots of stealth and caution.
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