Madkanu

Nice day out Zoran! Well done!

Great outing Zoran! Really nice to see you made it out and wound up bagging a couple feeds.

@DerekD, you are a gentleman and a scholar. So happy to see the creation of these new badges and formal recognition of everything you do for this fishing community. You certainly reignited an enjoyment of fishing that that been dormant in me for many years and I’m looking forward to catching up with you over the holidays.

Thanks for the details Zoran. I’ve been a bit broken out of late with what looks like contact dermatitis. Guess I’ll need to download the app add see what’s in the aftershave cream I’ve been using!

Great fish @Pickles and good luck to you and Rosie at the Nationals. I used to train, trial and duck hunt with retrievers with my dad in Northern Ontario when I was a kid. Good luck!

He’s never going to forget that fish!

Glad to see you got the flattie in the end for the effort and got to test out the new set up.

Thanks @Little_Flatty. The sashimi angle is definitely something I will need to try. I do love a good feed of sushi.

Thanks @saltrix. I was thinking salt water would probably be a smarter way to go. At least I got 2/3rds of the beer in me with lunch. Thanks @LuckyFil. Zoran had mentioned that to me as well. I’ll have to do a bit more research into that I think but I’m game! Thanks Zoran. Yes, the turbo shrimp lived up to its name 🤣. I definitely feel very fortunate to have the backyard I do and @DerekD has shown me some great spots I need to go try again. No shortage of good spots to throw a line in.

I finally got around to dropping a line in the water this morning after a few weeks of not fishing - the last outing being “One of These Days” with Zoran @zmk1962 . I was a bit lazy and so just headed down to the Newport Wharf which is a few minutes from home. The tide was rising and a bit slack so probably not really the right time for the location but regardless, I pressed ahead with the logic of the best time to fish is when you can. I had absolutely no action for the first couple of hours. I had started out with a glassy soft plastic (which has been quite productive in the past), then thought I might see if there were any squid around (nope), then tried a double clutch crank bait (nada), then switched back to a soft plastic but out of a bit of a sense of desperation for a bit rigged it up with a Gulp nuclear chicken prawn. First cast I went hard but something was wrapped so I broke my knot (luckily not the tip of my rod) and watched the nuclear prawn fly across towards the opposite shore. At this point I contemplated calling it a morning but decided to retie and have another go. Had to retie the FG knot twice as the first attempt didn’t hold under pressure so started over and had another go. Finally back in business, I was playing with the soft plastic prawn and it was probably on about the 5th cast that I got a hit. @DerekD you’ll be happy to know that this was your soft plastic retrieve that I had dialed back a bit and the strike was on one of the pauses. The result, a decent Trevally. I stuck around for another 45 minutes or so but couldn’t find another so that was it for me. Home to learn how to fillet and prepare Trevally. Thanks @zmk1962 for the tips. The internet revealed lots of opinions about this fish and my wife certainly noticed how fishy it smelled when I brought the fillets into the kitchen. I wound up trimming away all of the red flesh and blood line and, as I didn’t have any sea water at home, I rinsed it in beer before a bit of flour, salt and pepper, egg, then panko crumb and a fry in a very thin layer of hot oil. It came out great (not fishy at all) and was plenty for four fish tacos. Definitely one I would do again!

Great day out and great report Zoran! You had a much more fun day that I did. Clearly no issue blasting the rockin’ tunes and spooking the fish when you’re fishing in 470m of water!

This week’s fishing expedition resulted in a smallish sergeant baker that I filleted and then skinned. When I got home I realised just how boney it was (admittedly I had been warned) and by the time I managed to debone it I was left with 6 thin strips of meat. I decided to turn these into fish burgers. This being my first attempt at fish burger patties, I thought I would post the result here. They turned out pretty well but I’m interested in others’ experience and preferences. Ingredients: 120 g fish - diced into roughly 0.5cm pieces 1/3 of a large dill pickle - finely diced 6g ginger - finely chopped 1/2 a large clove of garlic - finely chopped 1 egg About 1/2 to 1 cup panko bread crumbs salt and pepper (you know best how much you’ll want) Method: In a medium sized mixing bowl first whisk the egg Add the fish, pickles, ginger, garlic and salt and pepper and about half of the bread crumbs Start mixing everything together with your hands and begin forming the mixture into a ball. Keep adding more bread crumbs a bit at a time until you are able to form a ball that holds together. Divide the mixture in two and form 2 patties. I happened to make these after breakfast and so put them in a container in the fridge for a few hours. I ate one the first day which I cooked on the stovetop in a lightly oiled grill pan. The second I grilled the next day on a gas grill. Both methods worked well. A few pictures below in case you want to eyeball the quantities. In my case the pickles were a substitute for capers which was my original plan but I didn’t find in our fridge. You may want to try something else to add acidity like lemon juice. An idea of how much of the breadcrumbs I started with. I probably wound up adding about this much again before the mixture really held together.

See, I knew you’d fill in the “blanks”! 🙂 iI seem to remember the navy ship identifying itself as “Australian Warship Valencia” but I probably misheard it as my wife just pointed me towards the Pittwater Boaties Facebook group because of a post she saw and apparently HMAS Diamantina (a minesweeper - https://www.navy.gov.au/hmas-diamantina-ii?fbclid=IwAR2Mpv6-F6PE88jEYMKALg0Y-iF38NgoCEwrhfSGD4I6Ps349wo9oKtMvi8_aem_AaSpBkgbLU466Wse6RnhoOlP_RKWZkhkggY0QLsrAXLVbMIEgPHTDUS4IJWnyieQI6k&mibextid=Zxz2cZ) has been hanging about. Whatever it was firing/detonating/practicing looking for we didn’t hear but one of the bits I heard over the radio was that it was 30kg.

Great session!

Great pictures!

Absolutely @Pickles! Always a pleasure spending time with those two. Interesting about the hairtails. Reason enough to be out fishing in the rain.

@zmk1962 and I have been talking about getting out fishing one of these days. Unfortunately that has been a challenge as Zoran wisely fishes mid week to avoid the busy ramps and I unfortunately still have to work for a living. As chance you have it, I had a few days off this week currently being between jobs and so wind and swell forecasts pointed to yesterday being our day. Rain forecast was a bit “sub-optimal” but we agreed we were all game to push ahead. We hit the Brooklyn boat ramp at 6am. (Wow, nobody here!) and were on the water for sunrise. We tucked in just around West Head to load up on yakkas before venturing out to a few of Zoran’s offshore spots to look for flatties. Maria hauled up a couple shovelnose rays which went back and Zoran pulled in a keeper tailor and an octopus which we sent back. As far as flatties go, we only found a couple of small spikey rats and mice. After trying a few different spots we had been rockin’ and rollin’ out on the ocean for a while and the probability of rain had definitively flipped from 50% to 100% along with the wind picking up beyond what was anticipated so we were pretty chilled and damp by this point and elected to change tack. On our way to the next location we were greeted by a harbour seal sunning itself (what sun?!). Maybe things were looking up. We went to work looking for snapper and immediately started having a bit of action. Not what we came for but a few rock cod, a sergeant baker and nannygai came aboard and assured dinner was sorted. Once things quieted down in the land of red fish, we headed back into the mouth of the Hawkesbury to see what else we could come up with. Within minutes we hit upon two hairtails. Maria brought hers aboard first and while Zoran was managing that one struck my yakka. I had to keep him double parked for a few minutes until Zoran had Maria’s safely in the well. maybe not huge for a hairtail but I was pretty thrilled with it. The next bit of action was a decent sized squid which also decided it wanted a meal of yakka. I decided to keep him which wound up being a nice entree of salt and pepper squid before dinner last night. (not the fanciest of presentations but it didn’t last long) Soon after the tidal flow decreased and things slowed down again. Around 2:30pm we elected to call it a day. I’ll leave it to the master to fill in any blanks in this story as well as correct anything I may have wrong. I really just wanted to thank Zoran and Maria for a fantastic day and thanks Zoran for your patience with my questions, the hairtail and rockcod cleaning lessons and some of the tangles we had to deal with. A great day and one I won’t soon forget (particularly as we eat our way through the rest of the catch!) Thanks for the experience! Rob

Thanks @XD351!

@zmk1962 I’m currently looking for lunch recipes as you can imagine. I was going to make fish burgers but have some tortillas in the fridge so think I’ll try this instead.

Fantastic article Derek! Thanks for all the time that went into producing it on top of all the time you already spend teaching. I’ll have to go back and work my way through all of the linked content now!

Fantastic report! Thanks for sharing the details.

Hey @Bennyg78 thanks and yeah, we should do that soon for sure.

Wow @zmk1962. That was busy day out on the water and must have been a ton of fun - even with the hook incident. Have you thought about producing an edit of the video at 2X with the Benny Hill theme music overlayed? 🙂

No doubt @Little_Flatty. A toolkit of techniques to now start thinking about how to apply differently in various situations. Haha. Yeah, you and me both. She’s seen me catch plenty of fish over the years so certainly had been wondering why this had been taking so long. 🤣 She is a great cook and she’ll definitely be game for experimenting with whatever comes next. I have definitely gone from not really knowing where to start and random experimentation to a solid toolkit of techniques for specific targets that I can work on and I am grateful for the years you’ve shaved off that learning curve. Thanks again.

Beautiful catch!