Who Is Rui? The Story Behind Australia's Longest-Running Eging Brand

Most pages on this site sell a squid jig or teach a technique. This one is different — it’s about the person behind RUI Fishing Tackles, and why his squid fishing advice has been trusted in Australia since 2008.

Because here’s the thing worth knowing before you take anyone’s eging advice: knowledge earned on the water is not the same as a marketing claim. Rui’s has nearly two decades behind it.

From 2008 to today

2008 — The start: Japanese eging comes to Victoria Rui began studying Japanese eging and bringing the Japanese egi that were defining the sport into Australia. At the time, dedicated squid jig fishing was still a niche pursuit here — the deliberate, technique-driven eging approach the Japanese had refined was barely known on Victorian piers.

2012 — Designing his own squid jigs After years of importing and fishing those jigs across Port Phillip Bay and Western Port, Rui started designing his own. Not to copy a catalogue, but to fix what didn’t suit local water — sink behaviour, colour balance and cloth durability for Australian reef, weed and wind.

2015 — RUI is born The RUI range launched, and the brand grew into one of Australia’s longest-running specialist squid jig sellers — built on testing, not just stock.

Today — squidfishing.com.au The next step wasn’t another product. It was this site: a place to teach anglers how squid actually behave and why certain techniques consistently out-fish others — the part you can’t buy off a shelf.

Building the Australian eging community

Since 2008, Rui has tested thousands of squid jigs across Port Phillip Bay, Western Port and the Victorian coastline.

Over the years, many anglers who originally followed Rui’s techniques, articles and product recommendations have gone on to become tackle retailers, content creators and even launch their own squid jig brands. Rui sees this as evidence that his methods work.

While products can be copied, knowledge earned through the better part of two decades of observation, experimentation and time on the water cannot. That is why squidfishing.com.au focuses not only on selling squid jigs, but also on teaching anglers how squid actually behave and why certain techniques consistently outperform others.

Before there were multiple dedicated squid jig brands in Australia, Rui was already teaching active eging techniques on Victorian waters.

Why he started — and why he kept going

What the market looked like in 2008. Squid were caught, but mostly by accident or on basic jigs. The Japanese had turned squid fishing into a precise, active discipline — eging — and almost none of that method or tackle had reached the average Victorian angler. Rui’s first move was simply to bring the real thing in.

Why he started designing his own jigs. Imported jigs were good, but they were built for Japanese conditions and priced like collector’s items. Australian anglers fish snaggy reef, ribbon weed and wind, and they lose jigs — so what they actually needed was a jig that performed and that you could afford to fish hard. That gap is what RUI was built to fill (the full version of that argument is in Are made-in-Japan egi worth it?).

How the jigs are tested. Colour is matched to water clarity and light, not to a colour chart — the same logic in our squid jig selection guide. Sink rate is tuned to depth and current so the jig reaches and holds the strike zone. And the action — the dart on the drop — is checked on real fish, because that, not the paint, is what triggers a squid. (More on that in how to work a squid jig.)

Why the guides exist. Eighteen years of testing produces something a product page can’t hold: an understanding of squid behaviour. squidfishing.com.au is where that goes — from the eging fundamentals to why the plainest jigs so often out-fish the fancy ones.

The short version

Rui isn’t a brand that decided to sell squid jigs. He’s one of the first people in Australia to fish eging seriously — who then designed the tackle, and now teaches the method. Products can be copied; eighteen years on Victorian water cannot.

If you want to start with the jig most of his customers come back to, it’s the plain red-head. If you want to understand why, that’s what the rest of these guides are for.