Berowra Waters Blue Lips

[kevvie]

Hi Raiders,

....Kevvy back again... sorry about the month hiatus from this site but pressing work commitments leaves me a little time poor to share the wealth with you fanatics. Don't think for one minute though that i don't leave time to wet a line and get my weekly fix.

This time our strategy was to harass the local flatty populace in the bay and get some tasty little fillets on our dinner plate. This went a little pear shaped as a gutsy sou-wester blew in at around 30 knots... but at 6am in the morning gimme a friggin break. A tactical change was in order. I floated the idea of packing up and heading north to Berowra to find a little protection from the wind, the cliffs there always give some protection and give us a fighting chance to locate and land fish. So we headed north......

The water looked good, the tide was rising and luckily we escaped the wind ( for the time being), but the residents were on strike... 50 kms for nothing. The softies never rose a sniff and we were fast running out of ideas. I thought that to give ourselves a fighting chance we needed to resort to bait (god forbid) and see wether the fish were home or not. We located a handful of black crabs off the shore and armed with 4lb line and 10lb leader, if the fish were home we knew we were in a spot of bother. Getting cleaned up by fish is better than not catching fish at all.

With the aid of the electric and a 2kg rod horse and i lobbed our crusty offerings unweighted in the crevices of the rocky shoreline and had instant success. The first bream came in at over a kilo and raised the hopes of salvaging our day. Then another came in at just under legal. At this stage we thought this gig was easy...we would bag out in a couple hours and be back home watching NRL b4 we knew it. How wrong we were.

The ensuing few hours saw us busted up more times than i care to remember. I almost ran out of hooks. We ended up bagging only 3 bream but all were blue lipped oyster crunchers that fought like steam trains. When you hook em that close to cover its usually all but over. Now i know why the top anglers hit em hard early so they dont turn thier heads....

We went back on sunday for round two of close quarters hand to hand combat. This time i had the pro in toe.. my old man. This turned out to be a humbling experience for him. We caught 9 bream the biggest went over a kilo and a half. But like the day b4 we donated packs of hooks, leader material, and alot of pride to the humble bream. It's an enlightening experience to be behind the 8 ball like this. It's what makes me look forward to a week of work to chance my luck again. No doubt we will work out a strategy to be more successful with this technique but the lurning curve always is the best part.

Over and out.....

[Guest fishrunner]

Sounds like a great day kevvie .

Bream sure can pull, nothing like coming back with renewed enthusiasm to win a battle but the war mmmmm

cheers

Edited April 4, 2006 by fishrunner

[sk.]

Great Report there Kevvie.

I fished berowra few weeks back, and the fishing was pretty quiet with plackies, but I did manage a 35cm bream in Calabash bay, along with some younger models.

Any specific tricks in catching those crabs, as they obviously seem to do the trick when sp's are quiet

Cheers Shaun

[Mondo Rock]

Kevvie - it may be a long time in-between reports, but they're always worth the wait.

Top effort there!!

Mondo