Trolling lures is one of the most effective ways to find and catch Spanish mackerel, but the details — lure choice, spacing and how you handle a blistering run — make the difference between a full esky and a day of dropped fish. A recent outing filmed for the Tackling Australia channel, framed as a light-hearted "married competition" between anglers Angela and Scott, doubled as a clear masterclass in the method.
The setup centred on covering ground with two very different lures. "It does make a whole lot of sense to use different profiles," one angler noted, rigging a large lure and a smaller one, both designed to dive around eight metres. Crucially, the two were run at different distances behind the boat — the big lure roughly 40 metres back, the smaller one about 15 metres — and positioned to sit just beneath the prop wash.
That wash is doing more work than it looks. "Spacing them at different distances makes it really easy to turn around, so your lines aren't coming together," the angler explained. The churning water itself acts as an attractant: "It brings the hunting fish to come and see what's going on. While they're looking at that, they find a lure coming past them and hopefully attack it." A "fast walking speed" was the starting troll speed.
Conditions were in their favour, and the crew explained why. "It's great conditions for trolling lures around, it's dark, it's windy," one said. "It's the sort of conditions that make predatory fish really happy to come close to the surface to feed. There's less chance of them being seen and eaten by other stuff."
Spanish mackerel are fast, and the early fish in the session were lost to classic mistakes — winding against a running fish, or letting the line go slack. The advice was direct: let a mackerel run against the drag, but the instant it turns and charges the boat, "that's when you want to wind like hell." Above all, "you've just got to keep the rod bent the whole time."
The technique delivered. Scott went two-from-two early, prompting plenty of ribbing about his lucky "Superman blue" shirt, while Angela eventually got on the board with a smaller fish of her own. Each was bled and put straight on ice — "that's going to make a nice fillet later on."
The final lesson came at the cleaning table, and it is one many anglers get wrong. Because mackerel have relatively soft flesh, running a knife from head to tail along the skin tends to mash the fillet. Instead, the crew cut each fillet into slabs and skinned them sideways, working the knife down the blood line and folding it flat against the skin.
"Cutting them into slabs and going sideways is the best way to keep that beautiful texture of your fish going," the angler said — portioning the meat into family-sized chunks, skin on, ready for the cryovac bag and a feed of four.