How to rig up live bait with Al McGlashan

Al McGlashan: So catching a live bait, that's the easy part. When it comes to rigging a live bait, the essential part is to be quick. The only option is circle hooks these days, because we release a lot of those big fish, whether it be marlin, kingies, whatever. So you've got your circle hook, in the old days, what we used to do is just pin the livey on the hook, but these days, to maximize the life of the livey, we use a Dacron loop.

So to join the loop to your hook, all you do is put it through and pull it through itself and that's it. So now you want to attach your bait with your bridle. You need a bait needle. All predators will eat yackers head first. Because they're spiky little buggers, they have to go down head first, so you have to bridle them on the nose. The trick is with this whole process is from the time you bridle it to the time it's in the water has to be as quick as possible. Using a little bait net makes it a whole lot quicker and easier for us. Holding the bait not too firmly, you don't want to squeeze them, let them just relax. In front of his nose, there's a little bit of cartilage, same as ours, it's like a girl putting a nose ring in, only this one has a hook attached to it. Pull that out, so you pull the loop through then loop goes back over the hook, twist the hook three times, slide the hook back through and then go the other way a couple of times.

You can see that the fish is quite relaxed through the whole thing. With live baits, they'll always try and eat the head first and with the circle in the corner of the mouth, you can let the predator go if you want to. So there you go, nice and quick, quite relaxed about it, he's got a free nose ring. So the great the thing with live baiting, if you don't use them, you can let them go at the end of the day. There you go guys. They get a free boat ride and we get bait and then you're minimizing your impact.