New Signing

As a rule if we are fishing for livies we will fish over sand near reef before sun comes up and then the bait will move over onto the hard reef once the sun breaks

General rule of thumb is your boat will out perform you. What i mean by that is when you think its getting a bit much for you to keep your feet to fish and its time to head home your boat will still be perfectly fine

Great tailor. The monsters are actually becoming a more and more regular catch in St Georges basin since the netting has stopped

Cracking day on the reds mate. Shows the importance of having your sounder tuned in

I've still got one or two left. I actually paid overs for one that came up on facebook recently. It had another name brad lure with it but what i was really after was that little pearl headed piece just in case lol

One of my fondest fishing memories of huge schools of fish include one particularly special afternoon on our way home from a day chasing yellowfin that took us from JB canyons all the way up the shelf line to the kiama canyons with little more than the odd stripey to show for our efforts. It wasnt until we were on our way home late in the afternoon and were about 6 miles east of shoalhaven heads probably somewhere around nowra hill that we come across the biggest patch of yellowfin tuna ive ever seen in my life still. Fish between around 15kg to what i would have estimated at 60kg were leaping clear of the water. We spent so long trying to get these fish to bite. The only lure they were overly keen in was an old pearl and red headed bullet xmas tree that was probably older than i am now. Unfortunately for us the hook had seen better days and while it was hit more than any other from the rigger we couldnt stat connected. We also lost a number of fish on metals casting at the school and only finished the day with two fish of 25kg and around 23 if memory serves correctly. I was only about 9 or 10 at the time but i remember it like it was yesterday. The other huge school i remember was in close at Blackhead/Gerroa where there were literally football fields of stripies around the 3kg mark with the odd fish closer to 7kg. After my previous experience with the yellowfin above i was a wake up to the fact they were feeding on a mixture of white bait and tony slimey mackeral about the same size as the whiting. I grabbed a little pink squid skirt around 2inches long and stuck it over a matching white skirt before tying a loose long shank bottom bashing hook into it with a 30 pound trace. Was followed was stripey after stripey taken for the bait freezer. The next day was a similar event only i was a little more prepared and had three of the quickly thrown together lures on the go. I've never seen the huge schools of stripeys like that again which i put down to the netting of them. In these days they were poled by boats like the Anne-Marie, Wendy Bell and Ajax but that was about it

With mine i am thinking of putting a slit in the headboard to feed your line through so you can drag the fishes nose up to the headboard for easy measuring. Particularly fish like flathead

lol thanks for the offer mate but i finished using pegs many years ago when i used to use them to flatline lures. I actually added a stainless spring into the peg to add the tension required to troll lures with them.

grinner

Thats the main issue with using the band. There is no real answer to it. Im going to swap mine over for roller trollers for that very reason. Problem is i need four of them and the good ones are about $100 each and i have many other boat things to spend cash on at present lol

Don't waste your time with a release clip. Just use a piece of dacron and tie a simple granny smith knot to your elastic band that has been wrapped around your line 10 times. For 10 and 15kg i just tie the dacron through a single loop in the band, for 24 i go through both loops. With the length of the tag line on your shotgun rigger have it so that it is almost directly above the rod tip or slightly behind to reduce drop back

I've never seen one big enough to bother trying to eat. Generally though if its some form of sea perch it should be decent to eat

I run a signage company these days so i was thinking about doing custom measuring tubes and brag mats etc. I've got one of the designers working on it now. This is another little project we have running. This one is for my boat

I agree with welster as far as depth goes. I like to start in 30m for flathead. If i find im getting too many spikeys i just keep increasing the depth by about 5m. I've really taken to using a curl tail type grub in 6 or 7 inch size on the top hook of my paternoster rigs. I've found my better fish come on that more so than the bait. Not just flathead either. Dont be frightened to fish this hook up off the bottom a bit more than you normally might.

Get out of my head Ron. I've been playing this design over in my head for about a fortnight. I was thinking more so for bottom species than anything and how much easier it would be to measure them accurately. Then my mind turned to kingfish and dolphin fish........... make life so much easier

I've got a 55cm bass to my name but it was an impoundment fish from Glenbawn. A wild caught bass is always a better fish than impoundment fish

Oil fish? the scales dont seem right though

That's a monster Striped if its in Australia. I know they get big fellas more regularly in NZ

You will find days where poddies just won't trap. I think any of us that do it regularly have experienced that. My tips: - Flat juice bottles are about the best traps you'll get - Cut your bread into small 1cm cubes. If you use big bits of bread in your trap and it comes out the mullet will swim off with it - Don't burley too hard, just a little cube here and there thrown over your trap to get them interested. - Mullet trap better on the high tide and ideally when it is calm eg. not blowing a gale - The single best tip i can give is not to set your trap too deep. You only want just enough water over it for the mullet to be able to swim across it. Follow this tip and you will fill your trap more often then not

Closest i can find is a splendid perch using the IDfish app.

I had the yammie saltwater series in a 225 when I got my current boat. They are a very good motor but they are thirsty there is no getting away from that. On a standard days trolling lures i would use near around 180 litres. My boat weights about 2ton as well. I sold it for $5k and got a secondhand honda 225 with 600hrs for $11,500. While rick is right about it taking a while to recoup that money i do somewhere between 180-200hrs a year on my motor so it isnt going to take me all that long when i use just over half the amount for a days fishing. You also need to factor in oil costs on the yammie

My mate got one about 6kg in the shoalhaven comp this weekend gone

Around 20 years ago there was a run of spotted makeral outside crookhaven heads. Every year we see a wahoo or two caught down this way to. I know 'The Boar' caught a 4kg wahoo at Eden about 2 years ago

I know when the artificial reef went in off shoalhaven heads it was about 3 months before i consistently marked bait on it. I haven't bothered to fish them much other than the odd drift past but once the marlin bugger off i might take a closer look on the anchor

Feel like moving to Goulburn, making and installing signs for a living?