ARE YOU A FLASHER!?
In daylight and calm gin clear seas flatfish become docile and less inclined to feed, often just sitting dormant on the seabed. Adding movement and flash by adding sequins and flasher blades above the bait is the only way you're likely to make a catch.

The sequins work best if you separate them with coloured beads. A combination I find effective, especially for flounders and plaice, is alternating red and yellow beads with 8mm silver sequins. I fish this combination on light 12lb clear mono hook snoods and use a plain lead weight. After casting out every minute or so I retrieve a few inches of line to induce movement. Moving the sequins helps them catch the daylight to create reflections in the water and attract the fish, plus the sand disturbed by the lead can often induce reluctant flatties to follow the bait and eventually eat it.

Flashy rigs work best

If you're fishing an area where there is some tide run, then I use the tide to advantage. Instead of the sequins I use small flat blades made from the same material as the sequins. These need to flutter in the tide to get seen. The best way to present these is by using a small swivel link between red and yellow beads. Just place the blade on the link and this allows the blade to flutter in the tide creating flashes of light that helps pull the fish in to the bait. Try green and red blades for dabs and flounder, but plaice definitely go for silver blades best.

Another dodge to try is to superglue small gold and silver sequins to the coloured blades. This combination creates multi coloured reflections as the blades twist in the tide and catch the daylight. It must look like small fish feeding and as their bodies move their scales catch the light. Whatever it proves highly effective and is well worth trying next time you're struggling in gin clear seas.

Small Mepps type blade spinners make excellent flasher blades for flatfish if you need a little more weight in fast tides. Simply remove the treble hook, tie on a short length of 15lb mono and a hook and you've an instant attractor spoon. The silver chrome are best for attraction, but the added weight of the spinners body and spoon will occasionally dig in to the sea bed and create little puffs of sand that seem to really get the plaice and flounder interested.

TIPS AND TRICKS
Old tea and desert spoons make excellent attractor spoons for flounder, gurnards and even blonde ray.

Cut off the handle to leave the spoon shape. Drill a hole in each end and add a split ring and swivel. Tie 10-inches of 15lb line to one swivel, slide some coloured beads on to the line, then add a size 1 Aberdeen pattern hook. These spoons are best fished tied to 3 to 10ft of line off a boom while on the drift, but also take fish cast from the shore.

STORM FORCE FLOUNDER TACTICS

Catching rough weather flounders

Flounder are now leaving the estuaries ready to embark on their offshore spawning run, but many stay inshore for a while taking up residence on surf beaches. These are often big fish close on 2lbs or more and they can be taken right through to mid March.

The best time to target them is when the big storms stir up the surf and wash worms and shellfish free of the sand. The big flatties move back in to the shallow surf tables during the early flood tide to feed. The tides just as the winds ease and fall away, but leaving that big crashing surf are the best. Big spring tides or the smallest neaps will al produce fish. The water will be dirty and cocoa coloured, so it matters little whether you fish by day or night.

The best rigs are two-hook rigs armed with short 9-inch snoods and size 1/0 or 2/0 hooks. That said most of these fish fall to anglers looking for the last of codling using one-hook rigs with 18-inch snoods and 3/0 pennel hook rigs. These are big fish with big mouths and healthy appetites, so load those hooks with plenty of lugworm. The key to taking these flounders though, is to tip with shellfish, preferably razorfish that are often washed from the sand and smashed from their shells and deep water Queen cockles are another good flounder tippet bait. One of the best though, is the big estuary clam. The big long fleshy siphon fed up and over the hook with the clams soft body flesh bound around the bend of the hook with bait elastic makes a top notch bait for the very biggest surf flounder.

One last tip! During the flood tide the fish are often quite close in just beyond the roughest surf tables. On the ebb tide though, they are more likely to be hooked at long range at least 100-metres from shore.