11/10/2026
✨ SAY NO TO THE FLOAT ✨
Twenty years ago, before anyone here called it eging, we all fished squid the same way. A float, a handline, a bit of bait, and a lot of waiting.
Then the jigs arrived — cloth bodies, weighted keels, a sink rate you could count — and squid fishing turned into something you could actually get good at.
Most of us made the switch. Some never did. And you can tell, every single weekend.
Here's what I see from our boat: the boats around us still fishing floats are not catching what we're catching. Not close. Same water, same tide, same squid underneath all of us.
But it was never really about the numbers.
A float does the feeling for you. Eging is a contact sport. The take is almost never a slam — it's weight that wasn't there a second ago, a squid leaning on the jig while it makes up its mind. Learning to read that through the line is the skill. A float replaces all of it with a bit of plastic, and by the time the plastic goes under, it's already over.
A float picks one depth and locks you there. Squid move with the light, the tide and the bait. Counting a jig down you can fish five seconds today and twelve tomorrow and keep changing until you find them. Most blank sessions are depth, not colour.
A float switches off the thing you paid for. A jig is built to dart hard and then hover nose-down, tail-up. That posture is what makes a squid commit. Hang it under a float and it can't dart — it just sits there, or drags side-on with the tide looking like nothing at all.
And a float teaches you nothing. After a season on floats you know one thing: where your float went. After a season on jigs you know your sink rates, which colours hold up in dirty water, how a jig behaves in twenty knots, what a nudge feels like against w**d. Anyone catches on the easy days. It's wind-against-tide, dirty water, a spot that's been hammered all week — that's where it shows.
Will a baited float catch squid off a lit pier at night? Of course it will. For a kid, or for a quiet b**r with a rod in the holder, it's completely fine.
But that's fishing for squid. It isn't squid fishing as a sport, and twenty years on it still won't have made you any better at it.
Say no to the float. Not because it never works — because it caps you. And because, honestly?
No fun.
By: Rui Tang - Melbourne, Austrália
