Product Review: Infeet Sazanami

By Mark Gercovich

I love a bit of shallow water jerk bait fishing, so there was more than just a little personal excitement when I saw the images of the new Infeet sazanamis that Daiwa had in the pipeline. They looked awesome with the slender shape and natural hues being a perfect replica for the local smelt population that bream, trout and EP love to munch on.  With an anticipated release time of around late November, it was going to be the perfect time to drift along a nice clear rivers edge on a glorious late spring arvo and bang some fish on them. Mother nature however had other ideas.

Like a large proportion of the east coast it's been wet, damn wet.  Plenty of localised rain, as well as significant falls upstream in the catchment, have had our rivers following brown, high and chocolate coloured for weeks, leading into months. However the urge to use these shiny new lures, and to do something other than dirty water trout fishing, had my new Infeet Sazanami and I out on a very brown Hopkins River. Now casting tight to an edge with a lure that runs less than 1m deep doesn’t sound like a very successful idea. However the fact that the river holds a very reasonable head of estuary perch meant I was hopeful of some action.

EP can tolerate lack of salinity far more than the other estuary dwelling species and will continue to feed in shallow water close to the bank as they normally would when they are inhabiting the freshwater sections of the river later in the season. Despite their name, estuary perch (Macquaria colonorum)  also spend much of their time in freshwater. Being a eurythaline fish (like bass and barramundi) estuary perch are able to function across a wide range of salinities from the saltwater estuaries to the freshwater. Their biology necessitates them to travel downstream from the freshwater to spawn in the estuaries but will happily feed in both situations.

On a few of the first few casts tight into the bank, the twitch of the lure spooked a number of small bait fish which gave me a glimmer of hope that what I was doing might work. The tell tale “boofs” of a couple of feeding perch also heightened my excitement. Despite these positive indications I had drifted some way before I came up tight on my first EP. The fish inhaled the Sazanami next to the rock it was obviously sheltering behind, in a good ambush location slightly out of the main current. It was no monster, but a solid mid 30s fish that was definitely appreciated given the water conditions. The rest of the session panned out similarly, not hard and fast fishing but a handful of midsized EP’s, but all on the Sazanami in only a few cm of water tight to the bank.

The next couple of sessions produced a couple of bigger fish in the 40s which put on a good display in the shallows. The Sazanami worked a treat, with the combination of the flash from the Adel Hologram belly and the erratic action from the shifting weight system, giving the EP both a visual and tactile cues to hone in on in the dirty water. The colours that I had used were shirasu and ricefish which both feature the adelrealistic holographic flash belly created to mimic the reflective underside of baitfish. I always loved the Daiwa chrome belly colour and this Adel Hologram takes that to another level.

Well the itch was fixed…slightly. I’d managed some fish on the new lures and enjoyed a bit of rare sun on my back.  I can only look forward in anticipation to the waters finally clearing up and putting the Sazanami to use in the clear water shallows where I am sure they will be even more deadly!