We have our fair share of groupers when fishing with D.O.A soft plastics, whether it is the D.O.A ShadTails or D.O.A Shrimps we don’t specifically target these popular species.
Groupers are territorial but at the same time lazy and would attack only when we are able to bring our lures very close to their strike zones…ie. their line of sight. It is different when luring in a pond as compared to fishing over structures on a boat where the coordinates of the sunken structures clearly marked their location.
Fishing in commercial ponds which often releases groupers as it seems to be a prized catch is much of a different matter since we don’t use fish finders but requires a certain amount of common sense since groupers are not exactly keen on movement. Knowing the popular areas of landing groupers would help in locating your next catch because chances are the spots vacated by the caught fish gets occupied by the next fish. Luring for them is much of a slow retrieve with little jerks or movement since we need to bring the lure close to them.
Recently while fishing for barramundis in Hinchinbrook we saw a large grouper in very shallow water but seriously we don’t want to throw our lure into their feeding zone since we won’t want to spend our next hour fighting a fish we are not targeting. Many years our fellow angler spend 4 hours fighting a grouper we did not target in our fishing safari.
