Choosing the Best Casting Spoons for Spanish Mackerel

If you want to rack up big numbers of Spanish mackerel, generally speaking you’ll want to troll with small spoons behind diving planers. But, what if you’re a light tackle angler who enjoys a good fight? What if you’d much rather cast to those macks? In this case, casting with spoons is often highly effective. But you can’t cast the same spoons you’d troll, because they’re so small and light. Instead, you need to choose a proper casting spoon.

There are a million and one casting spoons out there on the market, so how will you know which is the best pick? Look for these attributes:

• Plenty of weight, so you can fling them a mile and they stay submerged as you rip them back to the boat at the fast speeds Spanish mackerel react to.
• A stocky body, that’s not cupped. Cupped spoons tend to ride on the surface when ripped along at high speeds.
• Not too much overall length, as Spanish Mackerel tend to feed on small baitfish. Spoons from two to three inches are usually the best pick.
• A shiny finish for use in bright sunlight, or a matte finish for use on cloudy days. Often, a matte finish with some shiny contrast (as seen on the G-Eye Rain Minnow spoon in the picture) is a great choice.
• A single hook rigged to a split ring; trebles result in a lot of pulled hooks and more missed strikes than one would think.

Casting spoons should be rigged with a ball-bearing swivel to avoid line twist, and tied to relatively light flurocarbon leaders – this species will shy away from heavy, visible leaders at times. Twenty to 25-pound test is usually about right but in gin-clear conditions and bright sunlight, dropping to 15 pound test will generate more strikes. As a general rule of thumb when you have located some Spanish (usually spotted via bird play) you’ll want to fling the spoon out as far as possible, allow it to sink for 10 or 12 seconds, then rip it back at as high a rate of speed as you can possibly maintain. It’s impossible to crank a reel too fast for these speedy predators, so kick it into high gear and then hold on tight.