Luke from Endless Seas Fishing has broken down his Spanish mackerel approach into a tight three-step formula: catch a live yellowtail scad on a sabiki rig, rig it with a single-hook-and-treble wire trace, and slow-troll the pressure edge of an island. A family day on the water produced two fish and a foul-hooked bonus mack.
Filed to the Endless Seas Fishing channel as a how-to, the episode has Luke fishing with his father and his brother Jeffrey, with daughter Caitlin filming sections of the trip. The bait selection sits at the top of the framework, and yellowtail scad—the southeast Queensland and northern NSW staple—is at the top of the menu.
"There's a particular fish called the yellowtail scad. It's absolute dynamite for the Spanish mackerel," Luke said. "If you catch one of those, do not throw it away. Put a hook in it and throw it out. You might catch a whole range of different fish, but Spanish mackerel absolutely love them."
The scad get caught on a fish-skin sabiki rig—what Luke and his dad call a bait jig—a string of small hooks with luminous beads and tiny feathers that imitate the micro-baitfish the scad themselves are feeding on. He fishes the sabiki tight against structure where the scad school up out of the deep water.
"This island and there's a bit of a rock wall here and creates a bit of a bay," Luke noted of the day's spot. "Your fish often like to hold up in these bays between the deep water and the structure. Very dangerous spot for them there because the bait fish can come through and get trapped between that island and rock wall and the deep water. But good for us. That's how we're locating them, seeing them busting up on the surface."
With bait in the live well, step two is the rig. Luke runs a two-hook setup on 69-pound single-strand wire—a single hook in the nose of the scad to keep it swimming, and a stinger treble back in the tail to convert short strikes. Mainline to a swivel via a Bimini twist, wire to the single via a haywire wrap, second strand of wire to the treble.
"Don't over-complicate it," Luke said. "Just simply you need something attached to the nose. A big treble in the back."
"Hook right in the nostril there," he said while rigging. "Not a lot of flesh there. That seems to kill them if I go too much further in."
Step three is presentation. Luke runs a very slow troll—just enough drive to keep the line tight—rather than drifting. He has been bitten off too many times by mackerel coming up to a slack-line scad and slicing the braid above the wire as they ate.
"If I've got the line slack and the boat's just drifting, I notice the live baits like to swim around and tangle a bit or even swim in a circle. And so your line's not tight," Luke said. "When the mackerel come in to eat it, because the line's not tight, they actually catch my braid line on the way to eat the fish and snip the whole thing off. You might not even feel the bite. It's just, oh, my live bait's gone. It's happened to me numerous times."
Current orientation is the other half of the presentation. Mackerel set up on the pressure side of structure, so Luke positions himself to keep the live bait swimming against the flow on that pressure edge of an island or reef.
The technique paid off twice. The first fish, taken on a live scad swimming behind the boat, went around five kilos to the brag mat—Luke's dad's catch. "That's about a five kilo," Luke said as the fish came over the rail. "Looks like your rig worked."
The second hookup happened before Luke had finished feeding line out. "That took it on the freefall. I could see it," he said as Jeffrey loaded up. "Wow. That's going for a run. Watch out, the fish is jumping." The fish was foul-hooked—treble in the mouth, single hook jagged behind—and released estimated around seven kilos.
The episode also covers bycatch (queenfish, mahi-mahi and the inevitable pike that the sabiki rig collects alongside the scad). But the headline is the tight three-step framework: live scad, wire two-hook rig and a slow troll on the pressure edge of any island or reef where mackerel are likely to be feeding.