Daytime Fishing In Bay And River.

[jewgaffer]

With the limited time fishos have these days, when the opportunity comes along, they eventually get it together and leave home in the early morning hours generally on the weekend to do a days fishing with family or friends. Fishermen are people with excited expectations and they are always positive and certain that they will catch a lot of fish this time because the morning paper said so and the fact they all brought cameras along, by the law of probality, must mean there'll be photographs of fish.

Everyone double checks to see if everything is in order for when they get to the boat ramp. The boys are working in harmony. There's methodical checking that the gear's in the car, the safety equpment is in place and that everything else has been done exactly right to the point that there will often be three or four heads nodding away in agreement. So far everything's looking good for the attack.

There is so often only one vital thing missing and that is a game plan but if you ask the captain his game plan he will rattle off all the technicallitys of his fishing knowledge and his previous experiences on sunny days in between mouth fulls of donuts.

In all the excitement no one in particular has any sort of a game plan whatsoever until you ask them after the event, where they were fishing and why they caught nothing as usual. Only then are you bombarded with the main ingredients, apart from the hard luck stories and that is the reference to the hoped for non particular species with a vivid description of chemically poisoned bait, wrong conditions, wrong tides, wrong seasons and wrong winds followed by some banting or other about Taiwanese fishing trawlers.

They only thing that they really know about the day is that you have to put some sort of a bait on a hook to catch a fish.... from that point on they generally take there instructions from some uncle Bill who caught a fish there twenty years ago and today they're all ears for uncle Bill who has a tide chart in his pocket and mumbles something about the moon at day break.

During the trip to the boat ramp everyone feels good about a day on the water as they admire the scenery and chirp like mutton birds along the way.....This often happens without the fishermen themselves having a well thought out game plan or even not having a game plan of any description....

There is lot of small talk, one liners and the usual giggles and everyone's happy to be going out to fish.

Unfortunately there's no serious fishing talk as this brings things back over to boring reality and a car full of dreamers of blue water and hooking up huge fish everywhere doen't need any interruption to the combined train of thoughts.

That's often the case where fishermen go out to fish in general with no specific game plan in mind......

Probably looking for anything from two kilo bream to a twenty kilo kingfish but never expecting to find only the other non specific rubbish that comes along instead.

Take Botany Bay for example... overall it's only fair to middling in and around the channels at the moment with only a few small flathead and not many good size ones at places like the Towra Sandringham Brighton run.....the usual mini size nibblers and the rays are doing well between the two bridges... not much activity round the pylons at all in the daytime except for a few blackfish...... there are not many bream around the deep water yet, but there are are some thumpers upriver in the most unlikely places with about a good three hour time window and only one move.

So in the bay in general, bream have been very scarce and the bream you do find in small numbers are still around two inches undersize.

There are still plenty of thumper flathead around but way up the backwaters, and thumper bream and school jew in places like in close at Lugarno or way up the Cooks towards Marrickville for example, for specific early morning and late afternoon targetting.

Of course you can put your foot down at sunrise and keep going around but only if you see the birds doing their thing ....if no hook ups after a thirty minutes, try quick drift but then if nothing doing, quickly give that a miss and put your foot down and head way up river, otherwise you'll tend to settle into the usual reef fish hook ups and they don't have much at all going for them right now.

You can go around the corner of Bear Island and get into a few salmon or do a flathead drift off Long Bay, but all that takes time and in the end you'll finish up a little dizzy and fed up with same old daytime bay bash.

The problem is that, the end result of general daytime fishing is always staring fishos in the face and they overlook the other type of fishing far more consistent and rewarding, because they all go out looking to catch moby dick or some big white species that's native to somewhere else.

So at the moment the answer is up river in the quite shallows and backwaters with nippers, worms, poddies and as much natural bait as you can get including oysters, soldier crabs and cungee.... on a spare rod some of the scented soft plastics seem to be working very well in the little quiet cul d- sacs.

The same principle can be always applied to Port Hacking , Sydney Harbour and Hawkesbury and when you think about it, in any other system you can think of when the fish in the bigger water are scarce.

jewgaffer

[bart]

Well said Jewgaffer. I love your posts.

CHEERS BART.

[marlin1962]

well said jewgaffer,another great post with a lot of years of knowledge put into it.

it's just the way it happens to me on the day before, and on the way to a days fishing.

the brother-inlaw never shuts up about what he's going to catch and still comes home

with nothing but bad sunburn to his head.

great report byron.

cheers marty.

[luderick -angler]

Okay Jewgaffer you been spying on me all these years down at Marrickville have you? there goes the neighbourhood! But you are right and another great read, oh by the way have been getting plenty of school jew of late well up the cooks at marrickville the latest one fell to an sp on first light meant for bream, i saw the fish but on 4lb he saw the pylons and made smart work of it, happens frequntly and i am upping the ante next full moon!

cheers

Royce.

[Flightmanager]

G'day JG ,

Great post , but #1 Son and I have a new game plan , we dont fish harder , we fish smarter .

We have been giving our " Spot X " at Watsons Bay a fair bash in the last few weeks , refining the burley mix , fine tuning the time we fish , and the baits we use. We have been trying new rigs , and so far , we haev returned with table fish every time.

Now , if I could just catch knobbies like I catch pinkies , I would be set !!

Ross

[jewgaffer]

Hey Ross that's very interesting a new game plan and fishing smarter. You do mean table size fish and not just ordinary old table fish don't you?

jewgaffer

[Flightmanager]

Yes mate , that is what I meant !! I found the tablefish somewhat wooden , and not that good to eat !!

Ross

[fishguts]

yeah a very good, funny, but true read jewgaffer.

..cheers!..stevo!..

[damariboyz]

Jewgaffer your at it again. If you keep giving us this great advice we will know as much as you.

I appreciate all the info I can get off this site and I take it all in. If it makes me a better fisho great. What it does do is tell me that the little places that I alway's pass, and think to myself, I'll stop there one day. Now I will make the effort and get there.

Watch this space for the report.

Russ

[Davemmm]

Here was I thinking of hitting the Wonny this week and now Jewgaffer has sent every man and his dog to target everything from The Moons to Blakehurst.

Thanks Byron it will be a carpark.

Just kidding. Good post

Dave

[jewgaffer]

Dave Could be a good one to fish the Hacking away from this weeks dredging.

Because of a quick change after the dredging and the cloudy affect on the run back, I am talking about the rivers flathead in particular but this of course would also apply to bream. The sweep of the run plays tricks on you from one side of the river to the other and with winds in the little bays, its hard to tell whether the tides are coming or going.

The after affects of the dredging will make it ''stifling" up in the mangroves and the water condition won't be inviting around the dredging area, with silt "dust" working around with the flow, because of the dead end and that was what had me thinking.

I decided the best fishing would be in the run back round the corners of South West Arm where the run out sweeps around and the little bays before that but I don't know the names. I also decided on around Gymea Bay or Yowie Bay corners. I mentioned fishing around the bottom of those bays from the bottom of the tide as a back up.

I am taking Little Jewgaffer in about an hour for a landbased session probably thru to the top of the tide in the morning, to either the Hacking or Lugarno behind my sister's backyard or maybe over to Menai, I'm not sure yet but the way I'm thinking it may well be Menai.

Cheers

jewgaffer

Edited October 5, 2007 by jewgaffer