Technical notes on Poppers

[Mark Stotesbury]

Oh hell,keep spooner away from that lathe can just emagine what popper he would desighn.have a few nylon profiles for poppers i made for guys at bassas you can get them if you keen worked deadly
cheers mark   

[Andre van Wyk]

Mark - Must defintely pop round and see you before I go to Baz.... the trip is up in the air right now as I can't seem to change my ticket back from the UK as the flighst are all CHOKKA BLOCK and the Baz dates have moved a week early.... right now I'm just hoping and trying to scramble a open seat.. hold thumbs!

As to Spooner getting near a lathe.... the poppers would have horns and teeth and talons probably if that hooligan had anything to say about it!!!!

I'll chat to ya later today,
Cheers

[Aaron Concord]

Angus,
The pic of the three poppers you posted, I can see the middle one dying around a fusilier school!

The tail weight is for balance.
Balance to prevent tumbling 'in flight' during a cast.
Balance to prevent the lure tumbling when ripping it to make it bloop.
Also, the shape of the lure + the angle at which is sits in the water 'statically' can affect how well it will 'pop'.
I'd go for around 45 degrees fully rigged with rings & hooks, though some shapes have a hydrodynamic effect that can make them freaks!
Play in the pool...play with the G's...they're your customers!!!
I even mucked around years ago with heavy gal wire run up through hypalon with an appropriate ball sinker as 'ballast.
The fish loved them more than I did...it was the 'pre-braid' 10kg mono days....not the best thing to use on Break Sea Spit!!!!

[Angus Hulme]

G'day Aaron, thanks for that mate, yeah I specifically painted that one to represent a fusilier. Where we go each year in the Whitsundays, the schools of vivid-blue coloured fusiliers with the bright yellow tails are normally prominent, so my rocket science degree tells me these will be the areas to throw the lure. All the big spaniards we've caught, have come off these fusilier schools, so it follows that the GTs will be close by too? I hope so, anyway.

My next test will be to come up with a more convincing finishing scheme (kind of like the Nomad/Blackjack lures, but I'll never get that good!). This will involve some sort of holographic foil, which I have tracked down. It's fiddly but will be worth it if i can get it right. 

Yeah, I am starting to get a better grasp on how the lures should be weighted. Backing off the tail weight just a bit should bring that resting angle to about 45 degrees i think. Good tips mate.

Cheers
Angus

[Aaron Concord]

Angus,

No problems! Glad to help.

You are right about the fusiliers. The G's love them with a passion!
Having spent a fair bit of time wide of the Whitsundays to the Ribbons of Cooktown,once you found fusiliers, you found fish.
The lures that were colourd more to represent a fusilier got knocked off more regularly, especially if the water wasn't 'soup'.
In 'soup' that occurs around the spring tides, colour wasn't as important as contrast.
Also, stick to wood as the main buiding material. Some of the Japanese stuff is pretty rare, though it has the best bouyancy and wear n tear characteristics for a guy building stuff on a lathe at home.
The wood to use...is the wood you can get and afford! Though I'd advise against balsa unless you are willing to 'layer' the heck out of it to have the layers grains oppose each other...it's a very time consuming process which is avoided by even using cedars or beech...let alone 'exotics'.
Queensland Sassafras anyone??

Aaron.

[Angus Hulme]

The wood to use...is the wood you can get and afford!

too right, I have learned this fact very quickly Aaron. Some timbers seem to blunt the tools in a flash, while others that are softer, tend to splinter and not sand very well. It is part of the extensive learning curve I suppose.  And the better known carving timbers like beech and jelutong seem impossible to find. The best I've found thus far is pencil cedar, which might actually not even be a true cedar. Confusing for a newbie, i tell ya!

Will keep those colour suggestions of yours in mind too, I know that when the big tides are running around the islands, the water can turn milky pretty quickly, due to runoff from the fine sand/mud flats nearby. The main thing for me will be to have a wide range of lure colours on hand at all times.