Weightless bait presentations for bream

I spent the last week of January on a family holiday at Mallacoota, the ultimate estuary in Victoria. The fish were on the bite and after using the 20 minute then move tactic we hooked into lots of good sized fish in the tinnie.

At one spot we parked the boat on the bank and noticed bream in the 20-35cm range swimming in clear water not 10 meters from the boat. The fish hung around even though our ugly mugs were staring at them. We were moving around a lot on the boat and I was surprised this movement didn't scare them. I tossed our bait of partially thawed frozen prawns to these fish and every prawn was smashed before it hit the bottom. Obviously this was because the prawns were drifting through the water column at a natural speed and the fish knew they were OK to guzzle.

You can almost imitate this action by fishing with a weightless hook. However even a weightless hook still contains a weightless hook and sinks faster than a bit of prawn. I am not sure how to overcome this problem and a lot of the time I fish with waggler floats. They help you see the tiniest bites plus they keep you off the bottom and out of snags. I thought that correctly weighted wagglers give a near weightless bait to the fish as the weight of the split shot on the line matches the weight of the float. Even though this is true, this experiment showed me that it's important to bunch all the split shot right at the float and let the bait drift down every so slowly in as natural a way as possible. Don't put any shot on the line below the waggler if you can help it. If there is some current, you may need to break this rule but try starting with all the shot bunched at the waggler first.

Perhaps the weight of the hook could be offset by adding a touch of cork 3 feet above the hook to offset its weight? This might be something I'll try in the future.