One plastic, two sizes, one finesse jig head system — and a big Morton Bay tide that refused to settle into a single pattern. Tackle Tactics TV hosts Justin and Declan turned a messy high-tide morning into a useful soft-plastic clinic this week, stacking bream, dusky flathead, a juvenile spangled emperor, Moses perch and even a little red snapper on ZMan Drop KickerZ fished over rubble, mangroves and a stray sounder mark that turned out to be a boat wreck.
Declan drew first blood — a flathead on 3.5-inch Drop KickerZ — on a patch of rubble the pair picked as their starting point before the tide built.
"We came out here looking for a snapper, but we'll take that guy any day," Justin said at the rail.
The morning's running theme was versatility. Each host ran a single plastic style across the session, shifting only size and head weight. On the flats they flicked 1/12oz heads with 2.75-inch Drop KickerZ. On rubble, 1/8oz. Sitting on a wreck in moving water, 1/4oz and the 2.75 again. The plastic's hybrid tail — part wedge paddle, part long worm — is what made it work everywhere.
"It's a bit of a cross between sort of a wormy profile and a wedge tail, I guess," Declan said. "Got that nice wedge tail on it that gives it a real natural bait fish tight swimming action."
Justin walked viewers through the three presentations on camera. Rolled with a twitchy retrieve, the plastic behaves like a baitfish. Hopped, the wedge tail flickers cleanly. Dead-sticked on the bottom, the wormy tail section floats and wriggles independently.
"When I've got that thing moving, twitching and slow-rolling, it's like a bait fish," he explained. "And then when I stop and drop it on the bottom and pause it, that long worm-like tail just gets up and floats around."
Bream stacked up in back eddies behind rocks and in the shade line under mangroves. Flathead worked the edges of the same shade. A flush of colour came when a juvenile spangled emperor — a reef fish, not your standard estuary target — hit a worked 3.5-inch.
"They have absolutely beautiful colours on them and they are getting pretty thick in Morton Bay," Justin noted.
By the back end of the morning a north-easterly had forced them off the flats and into the river. They finished off the session on a rubble-and-wreck combination, a 1/4oz head and 2.75-inch Drop KickerZ in blood-worm pulling a solid flathead from a patch of turbulent water with structure beneath.
"Big tide today, big high tide, and it just, we haven't really cracked a pattern," Justin admitted. "So we've kind of just been running and gunning, hitting a few spots."
For estuary anglers watching their tide charts, the takeaway is a small tackle edit rather than a tackle overhaul: a single plastic shape, fished in two sizes, can cover almost every piece of structure a big run-in tide throws at you — provided the head weight is matched properly to the water in front of you.