Hard body lures in brown bomber colour have earned a place as a popular lure colour combination for barramundi in estuary and coastal mangrove edged water. The same colour scheme is a great colour combination for flies used to target barra along the edge of mangroves.
Guns and Roses coloured of red over chartreuse are very popular hard body and soft plastic lure colours in Queensland and work equally well for flies particularly in low visibility water.
This is my favorite ‘all rounder’ colour for many flies that I use in Queensland and works in both fresh and salt water, day or night.
if I could only carry one colour mutant clouser that would be olive over UV shrimp. That one colour tied in a range of sizes covers a big cross section of fish that I target in Central Queensland.
This is the biggest pregnant prawn fly that I tie and is one of my goto flies here in Central Queensland when targeting barramundi in estuary and harbor waters. It’s not unusual to hook up on queenfish, travally, flathead or other species that eat prawns.
in the process of Tiewell being sold and reinvented the large rubber tails for #2/0 versions of my estuary fly never came back on the market. What I have come up with as an alternative is using the rear half of the 2.5? Z Man Grub Z. That has created an even better fly.
This fly has been designed to have an obvious bait fish profile and is my ‘goto’ fly when targeting sighted big ambush predators or pelagics or when prospecting for the same predators around structure. This is a big fly with the #4/0 version being 11.5 cm long but because it’s unweighted it’s relatively easy to cast.
The set up of the jig hook and extension puts the tow point 15mm back along the fly so that a medium to fast strip will cause the fly to dart off in different directions much like wounded or fleeing fish. The 15mm of 8mm diameter closed cell foam tube above the hook eye give the fly neutral buoyancy so then when you pause the lure it basically suspends at or close to the level it was being retrieved giving predators time to attack.
My clousers have progressively mutated to being tied out of synthetic Flash Blend. This is my best mutation to date and as well as being very durable it is slightly translucent and moves well in the water making the representation of a bait fish better than the original. It also sheds water well on the pick up and back cast making it easy to cast.
Definitely one of my favourite colours for a CXI fly and an absolute must in my top 6 colour selection.
