Steve0

The poor man's Stella, the Saragosa has IPX8 water protection. I had no problems with my (at least) annually serviced Shimano Saragosa 5000, tossing mostly 40g lures fishing an average 3 days per week for about 8 years, including a couple of washes in breaking waves after accidentally dropping my rod. Before that, I wore out two unsealed reels in about 12 months (bathed neither of those in surf). To give you some idea how hard I fished, the crank handle on one unsealed reel wore halfway through in six months. Fine sand does a lot of damage! Gears were OK. Bottom line: make sure you get a well sealed reel for serious beach fishing. Shimano offer a lower priced Spheros, at a slightly lower price than Saragosa but has the same sealing and would suit someone who beach fishes less frequently than I did. Unfortunately, the Shimano reel sealing is limited to 5000 and up reels and up and not every Shimano reel has it. The feature to look for is X-shield. X-protect is a lower level of protection for lighter reels. Review from a comprehensive tester: https://www.alanhawk.com/reviews/spswa/ Edit: added review of Saragosa https://www.alanhawk.com/reviews/sgwa.html

Nice Trev and well done keeping your cool to land it after the disaster. The sensation you described as buried, is likely being amongst weed. When lucky, braid will saw its way through weed. Sometimes you may need to back off pressure and allow the fish time to swim out. You discovered one of the disadvantages of modern rods. Fibreglass (and composite) are more forgiving, but you trade off feel to get it.

The tail is a good guide, but some species may confuse people. For example: https://fishesofaustralia.net.au/home/species/1005 Chasing the difference between Sole and Flounder, I ran across this https://sciencing.com/difference-between-sole-flounder-5841071.html Note that information is not from an Aussie .edu or .gov. Assuming that the advice is universally correct, left body side up would make it a Flounder.

Just for those people, I am giving away location X. Salmon are on the chew in Coles.

Artificial light sources don't spread far, so may be an advantage over chasing fish under a full moon. My experience down South is the small Tailor school with similar size. Medium and large travelled together (including with Salmon). I only caught one horse, and it seemed to be solo. That was a fight to remember! Comment about the edge of the light is more to do with minimising the number of razor sharp teeth you need to bring a fish past. Hook one on the far side, and you need to bring your hooked fish past hundreds of excited fish. Tailor will bite at a fish (or lure) hanging from another Tailor's mouth. The odds of a snip-off increase.

Thanks for the report. Using artificial light for Tailor is news to me, but I have caught them under a full moon. It seems obvious, they are using the light to silhouette baitfish. The first year I started hunting Salmon and Tailor I bulk-bought 50 metals, thinking they'd last my days out. They were gone inside 12 months! Loss rate reduced with experience, but Tailor will always extract a toll. Losses to schools of small Tailor seem higher than to schools of big ones. In sunlight, when you see the shadow of the school, casting to the edge of the school reduces the lure tax. Maybe if you toss your lure wider from the light source, you'll reduce lure losses?

Mine is a 5000. It over-guns the rod, but Shimano's SW sealing doesn't come in a smaller size. By cumbersome, do you mean it tires you? If yes, try a lighter lure. My rod is 10'6". If I clip on a 50g lure, the leverage casting that weight starts to become an issue. It wears me out fairly quickly. Using 40g (when I've been working the beach regularly), I can cast for a few hours without getting too fatigued. 25g is even easier (and offer fish less centrifugal force to dislodge the hook during aerial heads shakes).

The X rating relates to wire gauge. Here is what Mustad say. There is more to strength than just the gauge.

You caught the reason I would make a poor teacher.

Enjoying the day, finding fish and increasing your PB. Well done! It is not surprising you found fish in salt water that looked like chocolate. We tend to judge from what we see on top. However, salt water is denser than fresh water, so fresh water tends to 'float' across the top before mixing. What you see at the top is not necessarily the same as what the fish are in beneath the surface. https://www.surfertoday.com/environment/the-fresh-water-meets-sea-water-natural-phenomenonI Similarly, if you test taste surface water in an estuary and find it slightly brackish, deeper water is likely to be more salty. You aren't the only member of that club! Gear failure is something to learn from.

Nervous people make safer decisions. Those who fish Eastern suburbs may have seen a memorial for Gary Chapman and Ron Nelson. Gary Chapman was an amazing swimmer and rock fishing champion. This is a snippet from his bigraphy about his death in a boating accident: I took great interest in the story when the news broke. The part of the story not mentioned in the article is that the boat's welded in fish box was missing. Valid speculation is that they were returning from the peak in heavy weather when the boat's fishbox welds broke. The loose, heavy-with-fish fishbox moved to one side upsetting the trim of the boat. The lesson is make sure you have things well secured so they won't move about in rough seas, upsetting trim.

Lightweight jacket and shorts (and I mean 'short') does me. Footwear depends where I am. Cleats or spiked neoprene boots on rocks, barefoot on the beach, old runners elsewhere (unless 'elsewhere' is in the kayak). If you feel the cold, Lavacore socks will keep your feet warm when wet.

That may depend on the company, years of loyalty and claims history, but you need to use the right words. First step is to find what you are covered for. Some contracts specifically exclude flooding. HOWEVER, for insurance purposes, flooding has a legal definition - natural watercourse rises above normal hights. Drains are not a natural water course, so water that enters your house due to drains overflowing is not flooding. In other words, if the house flooded as per the legal definition, a policy flood exclusion may trap you. If street drainage didn't cope, flood exclusion should not apply, but that doesn't rule out a different gotcha clause in the policy. <Sarcasm on> insurance policies are simple and we all fully understand insurance legal terms that are explained in plain English <sarcasm off>

Up here, we don't suffer water laying about, but a lot of the local area lost power and the Council says 5PM is the restoration time. How it went out is the mystery. AFAIK there's been no strong wind. This time, we (and the supermarket) are in an area not affected, so life stays fairly normal.

I never had much luck with soldier crabs, but caught fish on yabbies and worms during the same sessions. That said, I never tried small soldier crabs. Much the same as @Green Hornet but with minor variations. I don't stick with any particular brand of hook, and always bring the hook out between the legs. Instead of using the eye to stop the tail sliding, I use a half hitch on each ... uropod (I had to look that up!), which keeps the bait reasonably presented. I always found a yabby moving slowly along the bottom gets better results than a stationary yabby. A uropod can pull off when casting firmly and the down side of traveling bait is it catches on things and the result can be the remaining uropod pulls off and the tail slides down the shank (baitholder barbs seem to make no difference). When that happens, use the damaged bait as burley and switch to a new one.

When they are on, Tailor are great fun at almost any size. You definitely should not waste expensive lures chasing Tailor, but most cheap lures have rubbish hooks and rings. I recommend, replacing standard trebles and rings with high quality single hooks and rings. Why singles? They won't reduce you hookup rate, hold well and make fish a lot easier and quicker to unhook. They are also safer for you and fish you release. Tailor's teeth are razor sharp and a school in a feeding frenzy will attack whatever they see in the water, including leader knots, rings, swivels, surface bubbles caused by line moving through water. Cast at the edge of schools to minimise these problems. Check the business end of you line occasionally to ensure you have no nicks. Metal lures give casting distance. Chrome slices and Stingers are usually available in a common department store that sells tackle.

You may not need to strip the lot. If it contains asbestos, it is certainly safer to do minimum necessary preparation. Chase advice from a quality paint supplier or a paint manufacturer. For example, Dulux were happy to send me a full specifications sheet for a problem job years ago.

Steamed or fried?

Big, black snakes are said to eat other snakes, which would make a large resident good to have about. Not knowing where they are would be the worry. While usually docile, than can rile up as much as a brown. Snakes are illegal to kill and, if you do, nature generates more to take their place.

The bird quite often catches me by surprise. Working with a rake I might turn and it will be on a branch right near my shoulder. It grabbed my wife's sandwich one day. One of us had a laugh We had a tree snake visitor for a while. In a dry spell before we had guttering replaced, it was coming up onto the 2nd story veranda to drink out of the bucket we were using to collect the drips for pot plants (dew ran off the roof at night). Now the buckets are gone, it probably won't visit again. A few neighbors have had experiences with brown snakes. They thing they have in common is a pool in their yard. Bees may not be a consideration for pet control much longer. Varroa is out of control. Maybe this lot heard

Feel good about sharing your experience so others benefit from you misadventure.

Some species put more stress than you imagine on terminal tackle. I use Breakaway clips on advice of another convert. Easy on, easy off and strong. Assuming you stick to the rated 35lb maximum, they should work for you. They don't rust. After testing a batch, I bought in bulk direct from Breakaway UK but a web search will turn up other OS sellers (including outlets in UK). There may be different price advantages, depending on shipping costs and exchange rate. The value isn't too bad, so I didn't bother testing Alibaba's copies. Nobody sold them in Australia when I bought, but that may have changed. EDIT: Mine are black. Just saw some eBay ads. Copies, I suspect. As the image indicates, Breakaway have a few different bases in the world, not just UK.

Thanks I was out of granules but had some Bifenthrin and just gave it a dose. There were a few mounds on the older lawn (not bad) but nothing showing in the new bed. So, the new bed probably has some residual effect from it's second spray around December last year. We're on the edge of the bush, but don't get Magpies or Bandicoots that dig in for a feed but we do have a large family of Kookaburras. One of those likes to keep close company when I dig in the garden and he cleans up any grubs turned over. It sneaks under my guard for worms too and will fly in the path of my petrol blower to grab anything it turns up. Here he is checking my work when preparing the new Sir Walter bed in 2022.

Thanks for the reminder. My lawns weren't a problem until I planted about 9 square metres of Sir Walter. With plenty of chook poo dug in, it went berserk, needing two mows per week with grass deep enough to lose sight of the hose. Within months the grubs went crazy and then I noticed it in other lawns. I lost patches of the Sir Walter (self-cured this year). The rest of the lawns weren't bad but there were some muddy balls. The problem made me very suspicious about the supplier. Anyway, all done last Spring, it is due for another batch, but I may be a month or two late. I think the advice is to spray in August and February.

All that time finding Bardigrubs with shovel and cable back in the 70s and now I find out that Cocktail franks make good bait! Good luck putting James onto a bigger one today.