To fish successful with soft baits, some specific fishing techniques and skills are needed.
Your aim is to imitate a wounded fish that is swimming up and down near the bottom of the sea.

If you are drifting then try to cast towards the drifting direction or to the sides of your boat.
Make sure that you don't fish underneath the boats shadow.

Try to let the lure sink all the way to the bottom. This is normally the case when the line goes slack.
Once the soft bait reaches the sea floor, use your rod to move the lure up and down with stuttering uplifts and drops.
If you have a good feeling for the lure, then try to engage your reel just before the lure hits the bottom for the very first time after casting.
This will result in a more natural downward movement of the lure near the bottom and may result in a sudden strike.

While you do these movements with your rod, you wind in slowly to avoid too long contact with the sea floor.
The line should always be reasonable tight during the whole process. Make sure you don't have slack line.

I usually use soft baits when drifting in my kayak. They are very effective if just trailed behind the kayak. While doing this, you can add additional movement by twitching the rod up and down.
That way you dont have to cast so many times. Of course this will only work if your drift speed is slow enough for the lure to move slowly across the bottom.
If there is too much wind or current then you can use a drift anchor to slow the drift down. Otherwise the lure might move too fast and fish wont strike at it.

You can apply the same cast and retrieve action from an anchoring boat.
The light soft bait tackle allows you to get a good feeling for the lures behavior on the sea floor.
If anchoring you need to apply more action to the lure and also cast more frequently to keep it moving.


Check out this great video to see some soft bait fishing in action: