Creatures Of Habit

[slinkymalinky]

Made an interesting observation yesterday morning while catching bait at West Head. It's very easy to become so locked in to fishing a particular way you believe works that you can actually catch a lot less fish.

At West Head, the accepted method for catching bait is to anchor up about 30 meters out from shore in front of the pillbox, throw in some burley, then fill the live-well. 19 times out of 20 this works really well but not yesterday. When we arrived there were at least a dozen boats on the spot and we joined the crowd. When a Kingy came straight to the back of the boat as soon as the burley trail was started it was hardly surprising that the bait schools stayed away.

Time to break the habit and try something different. We worked on the theory that with predators roaming around the fish would probably movie in close to shore so we pushed in as close as we could safely get. In the calm conditions we were probably no more than 7 or 8m from shore in really shallow water.

Despite only being about 15 metres from the nearest of the other boats which were all struggling badly to get bait (we only saw a very occasional fish come over the side), as soon as we pulled up we had yakkas everywhere in our burley. In about 10 minutes we had all we wanted and left everyone else no doubt wondering what we were doing that they weren't. We certainly noticed we were getting plenty of attention from fishos on some of the other boats as we pulled them in one after the other.

The moral of the story is don't become a creature of habit. Just because something 'always works' it still pays to be prepared to change when for some reason it doesn't. In this case moving only 20m from the 'never fail' spot, had us back on the fish.

Cheers, Slinky

[robeebee]

did you convert them into Kings ?

[Josh88]

Thats good thinking slinky, i'm sure most people would've been like the others not getting any. Thanks for sharing this idea