huntman

chris paul, i am biased though.

I was there in the first two weeks of feb, we fished hard for not much. Lots of stingrays off the beaches, and there was a red weed which fouled our lines and made fishing hard. Blackfish seemed to be the most staple fish in the system although we did pick up a couple of nice bream and a big flatty in the river from the boat. The rock wall is a good spot.

post up a photo. It should be fine to eat, but there is no way to be sure unless we can see what you are talking about.

Hey guys, this has been posted a while ago, but there is a DPI kingfish catch and release study being performed in the harbour on the weekend of the 21st-22nd of feb, and they still need a few more boats. The research will be used to help scientists have concrete data on how many fish survive after being caught. A similar study was conducted on tailor and very few died, so I expect this will be something worthwhile to get involved with that will help show that size limits and bag limits are effective ways of managing fisheries. I will be there helping out, and if you are keen too shoot an email to paul butcher on pbutcher@nmsc.edu.au pretty much all you will be doing is catching kingies, there's not a lot else that will be required, just a few formalities. Looking forward to seeing some raiders there, make sure you let me know if you sign up so I can say hello!

my biggest is 95cm. I reckon its a baby compared to some of the brutes in the harbour.

I know a few commercial fishermen, one uses nets, the rest use lead lines for kings. There is heaps of dodgey stuff that goes on in the fishing world, and they'll never stop everyone from breaking the rules, but what has been done for kings is working, and kingies are in plague proportion in the harbour this year. I think there are other species that you should get more worried about if you want to get a bee in your bonnet about something. Like tuna for example. The tuna stocks are rooted especially southern bluefin.

I have done it successfully. The most important factor in keeping them alive is actually water temperature. If you have an aerator that is usually enough for water quality (provided the squid has settled down and not inked itself) but if the water in the bucket gets too hot then the squid will die. Same thing goes for baitfish. Depending on how hot the night is, you might need to cool the bucket down with whatever you can. I'm thinking of trying river water ice cubes, but in the past we have also just thrown a frozen bottle of water into the bucket for a while unopened. Hard to do while you sleep tho... You're probably better off getting up early to be honest Fish are easier.

sad to hear you guys didn't manage any good kings to speak of. I hope the day was fun anyway.

they don't have everything ready yet I presume. The study was supposed to start in december, but it must be running late. There's no point in them collecting kings at the social if the sea cages and stuff aren't ready BIGREDMAN: I go to uni at coffs, I've spoken to paul butcher a few times. Are you involved with the study? If so I might know you

it would be good except the research starts february I know some of the guys involved in this research, they were classmates of mine and doing it for an honours project. I spoke to paul about it earlier in the year, and I was wondering what had happened because it was meant to get going in december but it must have been running late. It will be interesting to see the results of the research. Get involved and help these guys Similar stuff has been done with snapper and tailor I'm told.

wow that shovel nose is as big as you!

I read a scientific study on jewfish behaviour and there was some interesting things that were observed about how jews live, what they eat and other things. In this study which was estuary based it was foun d that each fish actually has a single home that they establish themselves in, and they will pass over seemingly good habitat to find one they like. Once established, they mainly eat prawns until they are just over legal size (which is why many jouvenile jews are caught on prawns). There may be several fish in the one hole, but not a large number. Once the jew grow to a large enough size they require a different diet and ambush small fish from their holes. They also have been known to travel large distances up and down the estuary to find food, always returning to their hole. They feed on small fish primarily at this stage. The feeding tends to happen at slack tide, but it can last for several tide changes sometimes, and jews have been known to cover up to two thirds the length of an estuary/river system in one feeding session. The study tracked resident estuary jews and not jews that come into the system seasonally to feed, but it provides some clues as to the behaviour of the species. These are the conclusions I drew as a fisherman from reading the report, many of which are similar to what people have experienced: * If you are fishing on a hole in which a jew resides, you can catch them at any tide, at any time of the day, particularly on moving baits or lures as they will strike at it to protect territory or as an easy meal. This will often be a smaller fish, less than 100cm. * Fish the tide changes in thoroughflow areas to maximise the number of jews passing your bait. This is why bridges are good. Not only do jews reside at the bridges, but many feeding and immigrating jews pass there as they are usually built at narrow points in river and estuaries. * if jews are schooling up it is usually the immigrating jews, not the resident ones, and they are found seasonally. * flesh baits and squid strips are an easy meal and will do well for fish that are roaming around for food. I am studying marine science at uni and all the fishermen in the course spend every lecture break talking about catching jews and kingfish. If you want to regularly catch jews you have to put in time regularly into catching them with a single method, and refine, refine refine. As you meet old weathered secretive jew fishermen at bait grounds and out on the water fishing if they see you are a regular they will help you out. No one is going to go the extra mile an help a weekend warrior get onto a jew, because the culture is one of putting in the effort. All the best jew fishermen I know have been at it a long time refining their technique. One of my friends from uni has basically nailed down catching jews from a breakwall where he lives up north. He has got it so refined that he averages about one very nice fish (10-15kg) in every two trips, but he started out catching nothing for ages, and just trying to watch the old masters of the trade and see what they do. I think threads like this are great because they fill you in on the stuff you need to know before you even go out at all, but it's still perserverence that will get you over the line. If you really want a great jew, read all the stuff all the old fellas in this thread have to say, then get out there and keep trying everything until you nail one, then keep refining. Your jew spot will require slightly different methods to everyone else's but there's already more than enough info here to get most people started. My aim for '09 is my first beach jew. I've only landed them in the rivers thus far. I had one very promising run off a beach last year on squid, but no hookup as I was fiddling with something else at the time Good luck to all the raiders going after jew!

woah imagine if you packed up a half hour earlier

I've been using fins for a couple of months and i love it. Only one wind knot so far, and that was when a friend of mine who doesn't fish was left casting it unattended.

One kingfish that was over 100cm long was found to be only four years old. Growth rates and size vary a lot, and as you can see from those stats from the paper above, one fish that is 80cm may have had babies, and another that big is several years away from reproducing. The legal limit for most fish is set at the point where 50% of the fish have reached sexual maturity, so you are still allowing them to spawn before they get eaten. With kingfish, when they set the limit of 60cm originally they had no idea when they matured, they were just like "thats pretty big, should be ok". Then they did some research and realised it should be closer to 75cm or 80cm, so i wouldn't be suprised if they slowly work it up to 75, maybe over 5-10 years, especially if no marine park goes ahead around sydney. That might seem pretty harsh if they jack it up to 75, but the kings grow fast, and you'll just get more bruiser kingfish residing in the harbour over winter, and 1m kingfish will not be the holy grail of inshore kings, they'll be pretty common. Especially as angler technology gets better, because there are a lot more 100cm+ brutes being hooked and lost due to shoddy gear or inexperience.

Thankfully the issue does not receive clarity by trusting only Ross or trusting only the marine science community. Ross' years on the water are qualitative evaluation, and are as important as the quantitative survey done by DPI. Both have strengths and both have shortcomings: Ross's experience falls short in that it's not a complete piece of the puzzle, it's just localised observation. His experience provides good insight into trends and what is happening (for example long term decline of fish stocks) but no concrete evidence as to why, or concrete numbers to be able to analyse the rates at which the stock is declining. The DPI research provides good insight into overall catch rates at a snapshot in time, and shows generally the proportion of catch by the two parties but it fails to show any temporal variation, so whether this has always been the case or if it is just a recent trend. It also only answers one question (how much fish are being caught and by who) so follow up information on findings from the report necessitate another report being carried out, which is expensive. Neither is able to tell us conclusively who is most responsible historically for the catch rate decline experienced by Ross, and "what you reckon" is fine to share, but it cannot be treated as fact and acted upon unless it is somehow verified. Otherwise if you are misinformed then acting on the misinformation can lead to worse problems. It is very dangerous to dismiss science and just trust heresay, as it is easier to mislead people if you only need anecdotal evidence to back up your views. I am not saying Ross is doing that, but if we all agree science and the process of peer review is not to be trusted in favour of spoken experience, then the door is left open for someone more sinister than Ross to come in and sway people's opinion with misinformation and emotionally charged words. This process is what the media uses on the general public quite a lot, and is the reason why marine parks here have so much support. It is also beneficial to try to see other people's points of view. In Ross' case, professional fishermen take a portion of the catch on some species his customers target, so it is natural that he would not be happy with the way they operate. If there was a professional fishermen involved in this discussion I would be suprised if he didn't somewhat resent charter boats and hardcore recreational fishermen who eat into his catch, as it is his sole source of income. re: tonnes vs kilos, a bit of simple maths will make you think twice about just repeating the phrase without thinking about it: 1 million(ish) recreational fishermen catching kilos = 1,000,000 kilos 1000(ish) pros catching tonnes = 1,000,000 kilos So even in such a simplified example the weight of numbers adds up to the point where you can not honestly say to yourself that the recreational catch is insignificant. Boban: wasn't meant to be tongue in cheek at all, I like to hear other people's ideas especially people like yourself who are humble enough to admit when they are not informed about something rather than pretending and making something up like a lot of people do. I've enjoyed this discussion with you. billfisher: I read the other day yellowfin are overfished but not yet endangered. Bluefin, yellowfin, bigeye and albacore are desperately in need of some creative international fisheries management. Aquaculture of bluefin will be a good start.

hey looks like you did very well

beware the westerly wind we never catch any fish when it blows!

Some interesting points there boban. I reckon when you have time check the report out, I enjoyed reading it, and you can skip some of the sections if they are of no interest to you. The report is here: http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/fisheries/recrea...South-Wales.pdf I just re-read the methods and if you know about stats you should be able to understand it all very easily, the only jargon they used was stratified random sampling, which as you know is a technique used by all researchers in sampling a portion of something to get an idea of the whole. Interesing point about the economic balance, like would we be better off economically if we imported all seafood and left fish for recreational anglers. I reckon there is some merit to that as aquaculture develops, but the fish in the sea are a renewable resource, and until we can culture all the commercially important species, the yeild from the ocean will be exploited to the maximum level where it can reproduce itself (MSY - maximum sustainable yield) so that we are making the most of our oceans. Rather than importing. It raises another question for me too, are we repsonsible if driving up demand overseas by importing lots of seafood ruins fisheries in other places? I guess we can't be but it is an interesting thing to think about, and a lot of the problems with fisheries management are global ones, like how do you conserve a tuna that is protected in australia, but swims to thailand and gets caught and canned? regarding the state of the pro fisheries, I know two professional fishermen, one is old and basically is hoping to get bought out not because he is catching no fish (he actually does quite well), but because he will have to retire soon, otherwise he'll sell the licence. The other one is not catchign many fish, but that's because just a few years ago he got moved out of the harbour into a new location and he doesn't know the spots. On a system by system basis I think some systems are overfished and some are underfished. I hope in the next ten years there is an agreed management plan that is fair that protects the waters, however it will be hard to come up with something that achieves that goal while remaining simple. For example, if sanctuary zones in marine parks were replaced with catch and release zones, or trolling only zones, it would be great for greenies and fishermen, but very hard to police, and prone to ignorance. What do you think is a good way of regulating recreational fishermen boban? assuming bag limits are not enough because of a rising population. I'm keen to hear your ideas. i read that empty nets empty oceans report... it was odd.

I am enjoying this discussion a lot, and it's good to be able to be informed and inform. Kudos to everyone so far for not resorting to name calling and insults as many of the public debates decend into. Boban a few comments on what you have said from me... firstly the methodology - as you know in stats you can get a very very good estimation of the amount of fish caught using a two step process. Firstly a census to figure out how many total fishermen there are, and what proportion of them are "serious fishermen". This is the only part of the process that could be considered a gray area, or estimation, and as such scientists usually take a very conservative approach when determining the numbers so if their models suggest 2-3 million fishermen in australia with 10-12% being the "serious fishermen" they would generally work on numbers of 2 million fishermen with 10% being serious. This allows a greater confidence in the resulting numbers. The second step is to interview a representative sample of the fishing population to get the data they need. Ross, interviewing in summer means they are more likely to get a bigger range of fishermen as winter time only the really really hardcore people who dont mind the cold would be fishing, and the numbers they get they factor in seasonal variation. The method is a lot more complex than going ok you caught 3 fish this week so that means 52x3 fish a year. The methodology is written in the paper and can be read by anyone, check it out if you would like, but it has been peer reviewed, and is quite a well known paper, so even the smallest hole would have been challenged by now, so i would be very suprised if there was something dodgey in the methodology. I have read through the methodology on other creole surveys and they are generally pretty sound, and aware of the potential errors in estimation, as such they use modelling and conservative counts to try to get the lowest common denominator. The other thing I wanted to say is that kingfish traps and banning of pro fishermen definately increases the catch for recreational fishermen because the pros ARE catching a lot of fish, but so are we! and if they banned recreational fishing from an estuary, and just let pros fish it, I think you would find they would have increased catches as well. Lets hope it never comes to that, and that we can all be very vocal about the scientifically best solutions for fisheries management that will let our sons and daughters enjoy fishing, while maintaining the seafood industry in Australia and all the people it employs.

and if it was brought back in you would need a licence.

The recreational fishing catch numbers comes from creole surveys which (similar to an exit poll in politics) check the catch of a certain percent of fishermen as they finish fishing, and they can fairly accurately work out the corresponding total amounts from that. While your daughter and her two fish might not have been sampled, someone else's daughter would have been, and that is how they generate the statistics. It is also commonly adopted practice to be very conservative on the numbers produced, and so actual counts could be a lot higher than the numbers here. When you see figures in the paper saying 1,000,000 people watched dancing with the stars, they don't ask every person with a TV what they watched, they do a portion of the population which represents the known distribution of people and then use statistics to work out with 95% confidence what the total number would be. You can dismiss scientific papers if they don't agree with what you consider to be correct, but then if you are going to do that you step into dangerous territory, because you allow others the liberty of doing the same, and then reports like the one in the original post are easily dismissable by the greens and other groups trying to work in marine parks because it doesn't agree with their values. Bag limits are not enough to manage the fishery, because every year more and more people are fishing, so unless you keep shrinking them there is no way to be sure you have enough breeding stock left. Are marine parks the answer? probably not for a lot of the species I like to catch, but they are definately the trendy way of managing fisheries at the moment, so meetings like the one we have just had are an important part of the process for finding better ways to make sure we are properly exploiting the fish resources we have, while preserving them for the future too.

good work! you must be stoked.

Thats all fair enough (except there quite a few wrecks in the harbour that we fish for kings ). Accidents will always happen though, and as long as people are reasonable I think we can all coexist. Thankfully there are a lot of areas that hold kings in the harbour.

I've had a session where I was downrigging around another raider's boat (as close as 3-4m away) and we never got tangled and both caught a lot of fish. I am convinced the downrigger attracted fish to his baits, and his baits attracted fish to the downrigger. You do have to be careful, and we never pick up anchor lines unless people give us no room to manouvre, for example one day at a marker a guy was sitting right next to it with around 40 m of anchor rope out upstream and a livey under a small float (very hard to see) around 20-30m downstream. He was effectively making a huge barrier next to the marker, and even though we gave him huge amounts of room we still caught up to him once. If there a lot of boats around a mark though, we either anchor or try elsewhere... but to suggest you stay 40m away from boats at anchor when downrigging means on a saturday or sunday you can't downrig at all, since there is at least one boat on top of all the spots. I would hope people can just be tolerant of each other's fishing methods. You will sometimes get bombs on your anchor when people are learning, and sometimes like netic said people will anchor right over a wreck smashing the wreck up with their anchor and making it hard for anyone else to fish the site. Good luck with the kingies!