IF YOU are a parent and have a keen angler in your family, Christmas time provides endless opportunities for gift giving ideas. The hard part is disguising a fishing rod so that it doesn’t look like a fishing rod when sitting under the tree! If that proves difficult, the options for other fishing related gifts to fit in with your Christmas budget are endless.
There are some fantastic new Australian-made lures on the market at present, which have received rave reviews by anglers who have tested them. One of the new innovations in soft plastic lures has been the Prawn Star
As the name suggests, it is a prawn-shaped artificial, but unlike other lures of this style it displays the flicking action of a prawn when worked correctly. I use the term ‘correctly’, because too often I see anglers casting and retrieving lures without trying to impart a little extra action into the swimming motion of the lure. By simply working the rod tip from side to side, as well as varying your retrieve speed, can make all the difference to the way a lure looks in the water.
I remember a lure show I put on years ago at Underwater World at Mooloolaba. We took over the seal tank, which has viewing portholes down below to give you a look at the action under the water. What a perfect venue it was for discussing and testing various forms of lures! It was during this seminar that attending anglers saw firsthand how much better a lure looks to a fish when it is worked correctly. I had invited any backyard lure makers to bring along their designs along to see how they worked. Some worked well, but the vast majority had to return to the drawing board to redesign their shape.
This interesting exercise proved the point that the well-known lure makers both domestically and internationally who produce a first class product, ask a premium price. They have invested time and money in their endless hunt for that perfect action, shimmer, colour, rattle, or other aspects of lure design. The premium price is often a deterrent for many anglers, and so the option of mass-produced Asian models has now opened up a cheaper end of the market. You can bet there will be some lures purchased during the next few weeks in the lead up to Christmas!
It is a great time of year to be lure fishing, with target species on the prowl both inshore, offshore, and in Sunshine Coast estuaries. The recent heavy rains experienced along the cost have done wonders for the estuaries, which were crying out for a good flushing.
I took the opportunity to put the boat in the water recently, after letting the Maroochy River settle, and headed down to the mouth. My nine-year-old son was on board, and we intended to fish the dirty water line created where the fresh wanting to move out of the river had met the cleaner water wanting to move into the river, on the making tide. This offers a fantastic lure fishing opportunity as predatory species cruise along the line waiting for baitfish to show themselves.
Depending on the situation, you can choose to troll along the stretch of water, or anchor up and toss lures just on the clean water side. Either way, you are in with a good chance of picking up something. My son Hamish was the first to hook up on a medium size trevally. The Shakespeare Ugly Stik spinning rod he was using was doubled over for most of the time, and it took about ten minutes to get the fish to the boat. We also scored two nice flathead, and - believe it or not - a bream. All on lures. The bream was probably lost, but he could have been one of the resident fish that tend to hang around all year. Lure fishing for bream is becoming more commonplace; anglers are becoming better lure casters, and lure designs become more species specific
Actually, well-known fishing writer Steve Starling has written about this very subject in a new publication just released onto the Australian market. The Tackle Guide has been put together by the Tackle World group, and has 100 pages of product information, stories, ‘how to’ articles, fishing knots, recipes, and more. It will retail for $5.95, and be available from newsagents and Tackle World stores.
The recent rain will not only do wonders for the river fishing prospects of local anglers - it will also be of great benefit for the crabbers. We are right in the heart of crabbing season, and a good flush out of the river is like a shot in the arm for us. You had better start looking for some crab recipes, because it looks like being a great season for crustaceans!
On that note, if you are looking for a good recipe book, you can’t go past the two published by Phippsy: Hooked On Seafood and More Fish and Phipps. In the past, I have found seafood recipes containing heaps of ingredients that are very obscure (obscure to me, anyway), but all of Phippsy’s recipes are easy to make. They use common ingredients, and result in mouth-watering dishes. His steamed crab is a masterpiece.
The bay at Mooloolaba has seen quite a bit of boat traffic in recent weeks, after word got out about the schools of tuna and mackerel that have moved into the area. As usual, there are numerous methods being used by boaties, but the tried and proven techniques of lure casting metal slugs and trolling minnow lures, appear to be the most successful.
Because these schools of bonito, mackerel tuna, spotted mackerel and school mackerel are easily spooked, it always pays to remind anglers that these fish generally feed into the wind. For this reason, if you see a patch of bait boiling on the surface, or the telltale signs of diving birds indicating the presence of fish, you should move to an upwind position. You can then cut the motor and drift down onto the fish with casting rods at the ready, or elect to slow troll to the side of the school.
If the fish are a bit flighty and you prefer trolling, it can sometimes pay to let your lures out a lot further behind the boat. This way, you can troll around the school of fish and work it so that you drag your lures right through the middle of the school. You be assured of a ton of fun with these fish so take advantage of them while they are here.
No doubt there will be crowded boat ramps during the next month or so, which means an increase of boat traffic in our rivers. The water police will out in force this holiday season to ensure boat drivers are doing the right thing. I wish you all a very enjoyable festive season, and an especially safe one for you all.
Happy fishing!