Sea Fishing Lures

See Part 1
Not long after that we relocated to hunt some whiting. We traveled for about 1 1/2 hours and then anchored over the fishing

A nice 1/2 dozen whiting.

grounds. All rigged up and into the water. Whiting have a bag limit of 10 per person per day. They came on the bite as soon as the baits hit bottom at around 32m (105ft). Almost all the whiting which came to the surface were legal size and the count began to rack up pretty quickly. There were some small snapper and rock cod as well but nothing out of the ordinary until the person who caught the stingray managed to catch a skate of reasonable size.

He said that he was pleased to be on the whiting ground where he did pretty well, catching around 20, because without that he would have had a really crap day, one fish you can’t eat or handle and a stingray wouldn’t normally constitute a good days fishing.

The absolute novice was worn out, she caught 50 fish in total but only 5 legal sized fish. She caught 37 fish before her first legal one. She beat the rest of us hands down for numbers caught although we beat her with size and numbers of legal ones caught. All in all we had an excellent days fishing and cooked one snapper and 2 whiting on the bar-b-cue when we got home.

So the question I hear you all shouting is “what bait or lures did you use?”. For the snapper we used squid and strips of fish. The novice also had smaller hooks with pink feathery skirts on them so she had a lure and bait. The other lines had two hooks in an almost ganged fashion. Both were tied to the same leader, one above the other and were about 1/0 sized. It didn’t seem to matter if they were baited individually or collectively, the fish still hit them hard. What the bigger hooks didn’t do was catch the undersized fish as well. Not a bad thing even though they kept stealing the bait. The sinker was a lead snapper sinker around the 225g (8oz) weight.

On the whiting grounds the bait was also squid and cuttlefish but there was also some cockles. The cockles were the better bait but it is fairly soft so you only had two chances to hook up before it was gone. I began wrapping the cockle in squid strips which may have been a bit better. In any case we didn’t quite manage to bag out before they went off the bite. We ended up with 59 whiting and 1 trevally for our efforts.

On both grounds the rods were the same as were the reels but I think the braided line was lighter for the whiting, not by much though.

For the cost and time we spent I think everyone felt they had received value for money and a most entertaining day out. We were back at the boat ramp at 4:00PM, quite a long day really and we were all tired and ready to call it quits. Back to Part 1.

Have you considered what a pro fisherman would supply for tackle on a deep sea fishing charter? What style of lures, rods, reels and line to allow raw novices to use? I can tell you exactly what the Cape Fishing Charters use as I now have first hand knowledge.

Last Sunday (21st Feb 2010) 6 of us arrived at the designated boat launching ramp at 6:30AM for a days fishing. Of the 6 one hadn’t been fishing before, 1 was a keen amateur fisherman and fishes regularly and the remainder were somewhere in between.

I was very keen to scope the tackle and wasn’t surprised to see that the sea fishing reels were almost all open-faced spinning reels, there were about three rods which had bait casting type reels with small octopus shaped lures. These didn’t get a workout so I don’t know what type of fish they may have been targeting but the hooks and lures were small so the fish would have been snook, small kingfish or similar.

The lines filling the reels was, what looked to me to be very thin braided line. It was thin but proved to be well and truly strong enough.

After about 3/4 hour of fairly fast planing (the charter boat travels at 22 knots) we arrived at the snapper grounds and began drifting across their feeding zone. This was deep water, 42m to 47m (150 ft), and the snapper came on the bite almost immediately. The first undersized fish hit the deck fairly quickly, were unhooked and released. It wasn’t long before we began taking some legal sized fish though but there were no really big ones.

After several drifts across the grounds and still only producing mostly undersized snapper with a number of ring-ins in the form of gurnards, rock cod, blue devils etc. Except for one member who had not had much luck and only caught a gurnard and a blue devil. Then he hooked onto what looked like it was going to be a world record snapper, if it was a snapper. Not being an experienced fisherman he had the rod bent double and was cranking away on the poor reel which was mostly not reeling in much line.

Removing the hook prior to release.

When the fish wore out one fisherman he was replaced by one with a lot more experience who pumped and cranked the fish to the surface. Turned out not to be a record of any kind, just a medium sized black stingray which was released.

That proved to me the value of braided fishing line, this stuff looked like cotton and felt like it too but it managed to crank a heavy weight up from the depths without breaking. I have to tell you that I was impressed by that. The choice of reels proved to be a good one as well as they coped with what amounts to abuse and continued to perform while we stayed on those grounds.  On to Part 2.