Spear fisherman offers insights into the new rage on the bluewater grounds: vertical flash teasers.
Recently, light tackle hook-and-line fishermen have discovered the effectiveness of vertical flash teasers for wahoo and other pelagic fish. These tools have long been part of the bluewater spearfisherman’s game. For the benefit of anglers and subsurface hunters alike, I want to share some of my observations from free-diving.
Basically, a good flasher design should impart motion and emit pulses of brilliant light as the sun reflects off the teasers. You want an array that moves in a very light chop. Otherwise, divers will have to man the flashers and continually move them using a jigging movement, and that gets tedious after a while. This is unavoidable when the sea is flat calm.
A wide variety of objects and materials can be used: CDs, silver spoons, trolling flashers (used by salmon anglers in the Northwest), plastic skirts, hookless lures and even the relic of the ’70s—the disco ball—are commonly used. The array of objects is suspended from a float and made to hang more or less straight up and down with a weight at the bottom of the flasher. The length (or you could also say “height”) of the flasher can range between 10 and about 50 feet. For practical reasons, depth of the deployment should not exceed the visibility. In other words, the divers need to be able to see the last object of the flasher from the surface. Free-diving is the standard for blue- water spearfishing since most pelagics are frightened by the bubbles produced by SCUBA equipment.
The flickering, pulsating reflections of the flasher materials resemble a school of baitfish and can attract gamefish all on their own. It also attracts other small species, and the more activity you have around the flashers, the more attractive it is to predators.
Chum helps, too, by providing scent to accompany the visual attraction. Typically, a passing pelagic will come in for a closer look. That may be enough to bring the fish within range of the long-range spearguns typically used for bluewater hunting. However, if there is a bite-sized morsel of chum drifting down in the vicin- ity of the array, the fish may decide to eat it or at least come even closer. That’s the moment the spear fisherman strikes.
The hunter must time his dive and his shot properly to avoid spooking the fish or shooting too far, but those techniques are the subject for another article. Wahoo, dolphin, kingfish, amberjack, cobia, blackfin tuna and yellowfin tuna are all taken using flashers. Sharks…
