The Hauraki Gulf is famous for its birds – and for good reason. Come late October, they’re almost impossible to miss between Kawau and the Thames. And if you don’t see the birds, you will see the hundreds of boats (quite literally) stampeding towards the slightest sign of a diving gannet. When you do find yourself in the action, birds plunging like white spears in all directions, you’ll typically also be surrounded by countless boats, all fighting for their small pocket of space to drop a line. The carpark-like build-up of vessels will, of course, soon see the workup dissipating, and even while hookedup, you can’t help but feel a little bit dissatisfied with the surroundings.

And that’s why I often enjoy early spring more. The workups are more sporadic, the boats more sparse, and the fishing – while not as frantic – can just be as good, and definitely more rewarding. On a couple of recent trips, I was reminded yet again why the early birds are best, but fishing them can be a touch more technical, so hopefully the below can provide you with a few tips for making the most of early Spring lure fishing.

If you have a big boat that eats waves, feel free to skip this section. If you, like me, have a boat that gets smashed around by a 10-knot easterly and a-half-metre swell, then read on. When chasing birds in early spring, it’s all about picking your day – and recently, we all know this has been harder than usual. Late winter and early spring workups are typically more sporadic and in deeper waters, so they will require you to search wider and for longer. If the chop is up, this can mean a frustrating day (and your crew probably won’t appreciate the battering). My advice is to only search for birds on the calm days, or when you have a robust (close to live) report so you can head directly to the action. On the days when it seems too rough to go exploring out wider, I turn to the shallows instead. There’s certainly nothing wrong with looking for a bit of shelter and flicking soft-baits around for the day.

As alluded to above, early spring workups are often much harder to find than their November counterparts. And when you do find them, they are usually faster-moving and spread over a wider area. There’s also no guarantee that the workup you find will hold anything bigger than baitfish. All of this means one thing: you have to be ready to embrace the search.

Early spring is the season of patience – but be assured, the birds will be somewhere. If you see a bunch of gannets heading in one direction, follow them. If you see a large gathering of gannets sitting on the water but not doing much, wait with them – they’ll most likely either start feeding again or move off together and show you where the action is. And on the days when there is not a gannet in site, stay patient, and search the areas where you usually find birds in early spring. In the Hauraki, for me at least, this means following the rough lines between Channel Island to Anchorite to Little Barrier.

When you’re chasing birds, leave the bait at home, or preferably in the freezer at the tackle shop, or preferably just in the ocean where it belongs. When fish are feeding under workups and balls of baitfish, lures work best. They better imitate what the predatory fish are feeding on and it also keeps you mobile. Bait fishing works best anchored, and when you’re in 50m chasing workups, there’s no time to be constantly dropping and raising an anchor from these sorts of depths. So with that debate settled, the next thing to consider is lure choice.

Unlike the hectic late spring workups where you could literally drop a stick down on a chain and still get a few bites, early spring requires a bit more nuance with lure choice. My ‘go-to’ choice over the last three seasons has been small knife-style jigs – and my last two early spring trips confirmed why. When we pushed out past the cable zones in the Hauraki on the first trip, we were immediately greeted by a few dolphins and one or two diving gannets. I didn’t hold out much hope as the sounder was only showing a little bit of bait on the surface, but just to make sure, I dropped my knife jig to the bottom. Unlike less slimline lures, the little knife jig made it to the bottom quickly, even without the sea anchor deployed. Two slow winds later and I had hooked my first fish for the day. At these depths, I keep all my fish (survival rates are low after release past 30m), so it was quickly despatched and put on ice. The next drop brought up a bigger model that was roughly 55cm, and the one after resulted in a 90-odd-cm kingie. Not a bad start to the day.

While any slow jig will do – and may have enticed these same bites – Ithink the speed at which the knife jig drops (a) gets you to the bottom quickly, which is important when targeting fastmoving schools of bait, and in particular what lurks underneath, and (b) attracts the bigger predators. Interestingly, both the kingie I caught on this trip and the one my mate caught a few days later, were both hooked only a metre off the bottom. This almost certainly means the king chased the lure as it was dropping. Again, many slow jigs – including slider-style lures – may attract the same attention, but time and time again little knife jigs have landed the only kingfish off the day, and usually the most snapper as well. So, next time you are in a tackle store, keep an eye out for the Ocean Angler Micro Knife Jigs and their Fish Finger range, Catch Seducer jigs, Black Magic Flutter jigs, and even the Berkley Skid jigs and other similar, slightly fatter jigs from Daiwa and Shimano (even though these aren’t technically knife jigs).

One final note on lure choice: if you are doing longer drifts, I’d also recommend throwing a soft-bait out the back and letting it drag behind in the rod holder. I’m always shocked about how often this technique produces the biggest snapper of the day.

When the workups are sporadic and moving quickly – as is often the case in early spring – it usually pays to give up the chase and endure the drift. There are a few reasons for this. First, it’s always good practice to fish the “exhaust” of a workup (a piece of advice first given to me by Grant Dixon, who I’m sure needs no introduction). After the baitfish have been decimated by gannets, kahawai and whatever other predators are in the area, snapper – and even kingfish – will hang around well after the birds have moved away to feed on the scraps that are slowly drifting to the bottom. This is why – even in late spring – you’ll often only catch kahawai and smaller, more spritely snapper right under the birds, but then catch the fish of the day on a longer drift through the exhaust of a workup.

Second, if the workups aren’t intense or long-lasting, this probably means the dolphins and predatory fish haven’t done their job well enough. The bait hasn’t been rounded up effectively and will be spread around a larger area. On my most recent trip, we were marking bait near the surface for acres. In fact, almost anywhere we stopped between Kawau and Anchorite would was holding bait. While this is a promising sign for later in the season, it does mean you have to cover more ground to find the snapper and kingfish schools. The best approach in these circumstances, as you probably guessed, is to just endure the drift. You may not get a fish for 10 minutes, but then suddenly get three quick ones in a row as you stumble across a school of snapper. Yes, it’s not as exciting as the frantic late spring action, but practice patience, crack your beverage of choice, and enjoy the wait.

Third, it’s far more fuel-efficient. It can be a frustrating, fuel-heavy exercise to chase sporadic workups for hours – and it’s a very easy trap to fall into. You see the birds pop up, forming a small white cloud over the water’s surface; you shout “Line’s up! Line’s Up” and the crew get their reels turning; you thrust the motor into gear and punch towards the now diving gannets at full throttle. But then, the moment you’re in striking distance, the birds sit back down onto the water, before slowly drifting off, one by one. And then another small workup pops up 500m away, and the process repeats itself – and so it goes for hours. Not only will you waste more fuel chasing sporadic workups, you will also catch less fish than when embracing the drift.

I will finish with a bit of expectation setting. On the second of my two recent trips, the sporadic workups were all holding fish until 9:00am, so we had a great first hour-and-ahalf (I was already writing this article in my head, and it was mostly about how great a fisherman I am). And then between 9:01am and midday, we caught one more fish for the bin. For reasons beyond me, the fish stopped biting. We still found the birds (although they were faster moving by mid-morning), but just couldn’t entice a bite from anything beneath them. Perhaps a better fisherman might have an answer here, but in these situations, my approach is to just keep doing what I’ve been preaching for the entire article: be patient, endure the drift, and enjoy the experience. We were back at the ramp by 1:00pm with enough fish for dinner, so even if the workups didn’t absolutely fire, it could still go down as a great day chasing the early birds.