smashdcrab

Come on just be a little realistic about things please. If you want to use a 9kg king as an example...the fish wouldnt even be able to tell the difference between 10lb or 20lb outfits...he wouldn't even know he was hooked. They are both superlight to fish for fair dinkum kings. Even 30lb is too light for real kings if there is any structure involved. You only have to lose a couple of $40+ stick baits on the 30lb leader before you get the picture. And bring things back to land based where the OP started...boat fishing kings is a whole different thing again. And please tell us if your best king is 81cm as your PB list states , i would hate to think i had been wasting my time arguing with someone that has only caught juvenile fish.

Can you tell me where i can fish in 100 meters of water, land based please? And maybe you should update your PB list, you list an 81cm king as your best..thats a long way off 9kg. edit: and yea we all fellow raiders, dont take it personally, i just find some of your information a little off tangent...but im sure you are just trying to help so your intentions are good.

I think things have changed alot recently in king fish angling. He fishes 10lb leader with 17kg of drag and skull drags 9kg fish....im definitely doing it wrong. I also will take the 9kg loner over the 3 barely legals if given the choice. I would love to see a minimum size limit increase to 75cm like it is in New Zealand, so we have a more sustainable future with it. It is certainly not sustainable if people are actually targeting the small fish.

I haven't fished the harbour so i wouldn't know what happens there. There is obviously more ways than one to catch a kingy and everyone should just do what works for them in their situation. Sorry for offering my advice , it wont happen again.

just a misunderstanding man, i didn't really realize he was after advice to catch the smaller ones. I am just cranky because the swell is up and i cannot be soaking a line. On a side note, those stradic 5000s are really nice for their price and i have already recommended them to a couple of mates after using mine for a few months.

No i haven't tried to adjust my reel to get 17kg of drag ever. I am more of a traditional fisherman, in the sense that i use a drag setting approx. 1/3 of the breaking strain of the main line. I have never fished 51kg line, and don't intend to. If you fish with 20lb mainline on your stradic fj5000 with 17kg of drag and have success, all the best to you. And no, i believe the kings i find have normal jaws...but the reef that they frequent is very sharp and snaggy. I have lost good fish at my feet even with 150lb leader and also out wide sometimes. And i have had quite a few fish landed with a chafed up leader that i doubt i would have landed if it was much lighter. I have a stradic 5000 , i know what they can do, and i know what they cant do...so i have other reels for those purposes. I didn't mean to offend anyone, i was trying to offer valid advice. I am old ...perhaps i have just seen a few more lost fish over my time on the rocks.

And you recommend live baiting with a 5000 or 6000 size spinning reel with 20-30lb flouro? I hope you dont feel attacked when i give you -1 for that gem too.

I didn't attack anyone, was trying to help the original poster , that was the only intention for my post. Its ok, you guys go fish your 10lb if it makes you happy or if it is more suitable in the area you fish or size of fish you catch. -1 to anyone saying a kingfish outfit should comprise of 10lb anything ....since everyone wants to give scores.

The one who wasn't targeting 80cm fish.

For lures and stickbaits, I use a 50lb flouro , to 40lb braid, then i hope nothing bigger than around 10-11 kg grabs it, because its shallow and snaggy where i fish. For live baiting, i use 150lb leader , and i thought maybe it was costing me fish being too heavy, so i switched to 80lb for a few months, and didnt notice any real difference in the fish size or numbers that i caught. The 80lb i bought is stiff ugly stuff thats very hard to tie a knot in, so i went back to 150lb. I think your mate is right in using 100lb leader , he has just already learned his lesson from a good fish, thats all. Guys that are using 6lb to 10lb line for land based kings arent serious fishos, they are the guys that watched ifish, and decided that they could do it too, and they are happy catching undersize fish. Set your sights a little higher than that.

Be careful on Saturday, there is still going to be some swell around. Sunday looks the better fishing day on paper.

I wouldnt use it on the drag. Drag greases are of a different consistency . You wont be able to service an entire reel with one product. Get the proper drag grease, shimano do a decent one, but dont muck around...buy Cals drag grease, the tan coloured one, not the cheap purple one. Oil you should use on things like the line roller, moving parts on the handle...the areas around the bail arm where it pivots. The lighter the oil you use, the more often this will need to be done. Normal sewing machine oil will suffice, which is pretty much the same thing that daiwa sell as reel service oil in the little pens. If you are completely servicing the reel, the main shaft ,idler shaft.worm drive and all the bearings , bushes associated with it are fully assembled with oil. Really it is only the gears which require grease, but i like to grease all the screw threads too, just to ensure easy dismantling in the future. For oil, it is hard to look past the corrosion X brand...it will give you the lubrication properties you want with some additional protection against corrosion. My recommendation is 4 products:- * 3 in 1 oil - great for cleaning stuff initially. * Corrosion X oil - spool bearings, moving parts , line roller * Blue Marine grease (but your inox will do) - gears , non spool bearings, screw threads, anywhere where machined surfaces meet. * Cals Drag grease (tan colour) - dont use much, carbon drag washers designed to run nearly dry.

Adding to what the other guys have mentioned, carry a good range of jighead sizes to ensure you are fishing the bottom. The Owner Nitro jigheads are a good one that i know of. I find the 3/0 hook size to be quite versatile and just carry the different weights to suit conditions on the day. There is alot of different lures you could try and they all work, but definitely carry a few chrome slugs and if you are only trolling them, they may as well have skirts...they work on alot of different species and are cheap to replace until you get the hang of it and feel brave enough to tie a $60 stick bait on.

I have had a 5000 stradic fk and think its fantastic for its price. I think you would be happy with the 4000 but you should have gone 5000 for the rubber handle. The biggest king i have had on it so far is just a tick under 6kg, and off the rocks at least, i think i wont get much bigger than that , even that one nearly found his home in the reef.

If you go with a rod light enough to dedicate to soft plastics, it wont be heavy enough to deal with decent kings. Pretty much anything over 5kg will smoke you in anything but the clearest of water...which is where kings generally dont hang out. You are really looking at 2 separate outfits . A light soft plastic flicker which will be more suited to snapper , flathead . but could also be used to flick light lures around the 20-30g mark, and could also be used for squidding if you bought the right rod. It also could be used for catching live bait if you get into that sort of thing in future. And a heavier outfit to cast lures for kings as you originally wanted. I personally dont use a light soft plastic rod. I think i could use a broomstick and still get enough work on the soft plastic with enough enthusiasm. I caught some decent snapper last season with a pe3-5 stick, and i know i wouldnt have been able to muscle those fish out of their hole if i had been using a dedicated sp rod. I think some people get way to excited about the action of the plastic. 80% of the time its gets smashed on the way down on the first drop, and 20% it gets hit after i twitch it a couple times after hitting bottom. Neither of these times does the rod action really even come into it.

I bought a stradic fk5000 about 2-3 months ago and have given it heaps of work spinning. It has had a few decent kings, the biggest being 6kg...and quite a few around the 4-5kg. It will handle much bigger fish than that with ease i am sure. I would rate the drag 8/10 for smoothness and they have way less flex around the bail arm than the ci4s. The only complaint i have on mine is a slightly sticky bail arm roller bearing which can be replaced for not much anyway. They use this special corrosion resistant grease in there from factory and then tell you that you dont need to lube the line roller because it will affect its corrosion resistance. I find that they dont use enough lube EVER...and it is best to just lube it yourself regularly. They have started to steer people away from servicing their own reels , the newer stradics have no oil port access or grease spray hole on the line roller. I can only assume they were getting reels back with problems like wrong oil/grease types used etc.

20lb leader for kings is very light even in a boat. If you are targeting kings off the rocks, you should definitely consider going up in leader size or you will be only realistically looking at landing small fish. I normally fish 50lb leader off the rocks , and still get busted up regularly on the bigger kings. You can maybe get away with 30lb if you find a king with manners, but I haven't found too many of them. Even with 50lb , I find the only chance I have of landing a larger ones...is if I hook it out way out wide, so the big powerful runs are in clear water. The ones I have hooked at my feet have generally made short work of it, running me up and down the ledge, and finding something sharp to bust me off on. As for heavier leaders spooking fish....this is highly possible. But my best king of 17kg took a live yakka intended for a marlin with 150lb jinkai as leader, so this is not always the case. I have also had a nearly 6kg snapper on the same outfit that also seemed unphased by 150lb leader.

I am not sure if you are just ignorant of what they are doing at the tubes there or what. Maybe do a little research on it, because a decent size marlin will take 230m on its first run. Do you still think it is plenty? Don't just consider their baits...think about if some poor guy that has lost his missus and job over his land based game addiction, has camped there for 9 days straight without a run, and the only run he does get is fouled by your prop.

The loop knots are good on stickbait type lures , you don't want them spinning around on a swivel. But if you are talking about metal slugs being retrieved at high speed, you absolutely want a swivel so that you get a flashing effect as it spins.

Just run the swivel at the lure, connected with a split ring. The less knots the better in all cases.

I heavily salt a lot of my bait and leave it in an old freezer that I don't even switch on. I just use it to contain the smell in one area, and it really doesn't smell much anyway. I salt it in a bucket and then individually bag it and throw some more salt in (coarse) the bag. It is still good over 6 months later when I do this. If you wanted to keep it longer than that, I think fridge/freezer would be better. If it is heavily salted it doesn't really freeze anyway.

I agree mandatory life jackets is not the answer. However, it could be argued that if mandatory life jacket use saved just one life...then it should be done. Rock fishing deaths figures in Australia are heavily misrepresented by a large number of ethnic anglers. This is a group that I believe would benefit most from mandatory life jacket use. They are generally not good swimmers. A mandatory life jacket is not going to save a guy that's fished/surfed/dived all his life unless he is fishing in conditions that he shouldn't be. Mandatory life jacket use could in fact have a negative effect. It could result in all these guys fishing away with a false sense of security that the life jacket they are wearing is going to save them. Its like putting on a motorbike helmet, you can feel your nads grow physically larger as you strap it up.

Looks like you have yourself a nice outfit there capable of some good size fish. Have fun out there.

People need to be more educated on ground swells. Any swell with over approx. a 12 second period is holding ALOT of water , extreme caution must be taken. The swell period on that day was 16 seconds and on top of that , there was multiple swells. The more experienced rock fisherman didn't even plan to fish that day after seeing that swell forecast the night before. With rock fishing in particular , there is more to checking the weather than just looking at tides, wind direction strength ,water temps etc. I use www.magicseaweed.com and in 2 years of using it so far, I haven't had any surprises when I arrive at the ledge...but even willy weather has swell period forecasts that aren't too bad. The rock fisherman 20 years ago didn't have this info at hand like we do now, there really is no excuse to be fishing in conditions like that on a ledge affected by swell. I feel sorry that this fisherman had to learn by losing his life.

The t curves are pretty nice. I don't own one myself but my mate has a couple and I have used them periodically and they feel nice in the hand. That length will let you cast fairly well, but wont be too long to give the fish an unnecessary advantage when you hook a larger fish. If you can get that one at a good price, I doubt you would be disappointed.