mangajack

7/8ths of land based fishing is watching and taking notice....notice where currents converge, notice where food might be taken to by the current......notice the slow spots in the currents....notice the dis-colour of the water. Fish are not dumb, they know where their food will be brought to them and they will wait for it a lot of the time. So rather than concentrating on getting a bite, concentrate on trying to see where a fish will wait for food or why this place is better than the next. Select the place slowly, there is no rush....make the decision of where you believe the fish will be then specifically try to catch that one fish. Doing this will teach you lots more than pulling up to the bank and chucking a bait in the water. You will be fishing for a fish that is waiting for your bait....present your bait as a drift bait like it is expecting....don't anchor the bait near him. If you get a chance to be up high over shallow water, just watch, you will see a fathead move, then watch him some more.....every move me makes is to another spot that positions him better for a feed....take note of where he moves to and why that spot is better. When fishing watch your line, not the rod, look for changes in the tension or tics travelling up the line. Always fish with a bit of a belly in the line to the water, don't pull the line tight to the sinker. Try fishing sand banks with unweighted baits....yabbies and worms are king.....use the wind to help your cast and the current to deliver the bait....you already know where the fish will be.

Does the Jimny still run the 1.3l barina engine? I did 750,000 m in my '85 drover/sierra couldn't stop the little truck.

Scent at any time can not hurt. If you have a whiting patch sand bar that dries in your area, bury some fish frames or prawn and crab shells within casting distance and fish a a metre or so down current of the scent.... This has worked for me several times in the past where the fish are scattered. It does concentrate the smalls too unfortunately but the bigger ones are there too.

That's a greenback rod for sure Neil. Nice job of it.

It sounds like you are on the start of the learning curve for your area. Here are a couple of basics that work well here in SEQ. Whiting like the early stages of a run in tide....they move onto a sand flat as the water covers it....20cm of water is plenty for them to be ravenously feeding there. Use the local bait for them....worms, yabbies, crabs or small live prawns. Bream like structure with a bit of depth and plenty of current, again they are ravenous at the start of the run in usually. Bream will eat anything but offer them something they can easily swallow rather than something they have to bite chunks off. 5c to $1 size baits are good for them....pilly or mullet cubes, prawns and squid are all good options. Flathead are ambush hunters primarily, they lay and wait for food to swim by them....that being said though they will follow a scent to a bait ok too. For me flathead are the easiest to catch in the bottom half of a run out tide. Live baits rule, lures and plastics second and dead baits 3rd. Look for drains of flats or creeks entering rivers, they will be within a five metres of those spots. If you only catch smalls you are generally either fishing the wrong area or you are fishing the area at the wrong stage of the tide. You can throw all of the above out the window if you are fishing a flood zone.....everything will be feasting on the last 90 minutes of the rising tide and vanish as soon as the tide turns. Flood zones up here are mangroves that only go under at about 3/4 tide...often behind the mangroves there is a clear area of sand or mud several metres wide....when that gets 25cm of water over it the place is full of big feeding fish and very easy to catch if you do not spook them. 65mm squidgy wrigglers in bloodworm colour unweighted are the gun plastic.....sit or crouch down and wait for the fish to approach you...they move quickly and absolutely smash anything resembling food. Very exciting fishing. Good luck.

Things to consider with Lithium batteries. They do not handle high temps well. They definitely do not like cold to sub zero temps....Will you need to start the car early morning in sub zero temps? Is your Jimny charging system suitable for the Lithiums and it's BMS? From what I can see lithiums are best suited from 8c to 35c. What extremes of temp will you likely encounter? Invicta has been around for a long time and well regarded....unfortunately nearly everything you see on the net will be a sales pitch for them.

Take it easy mate.

I dig mud worms....sort of like soft wrigglers. Some mud banks in creeks and rovers have good stocks of them. By far the best bait if they are local to where you are fishing.

How are you fairing Rebel?

Thanks for the report Wazza, some good fishing was had there. It might just be the camera angle but the last jew looks like a hybrid, having a small dark base to the pectoral fin and the head shape of the northern black jew....interesting.

I am far from a whiting guru but I do quite well....I just dig local worms to use and I put just enough worm on to cover a #4 mustad demon circle hook. I don't care if they die, the worms are eaten within 2 minutes anyway. I think for sand whiting it is scent before anything other senses. Next time you are on a flat with clear water and a foot deep, drop a sent bomb out and watch what the whiting do.....they trace that scent quite quickly.

Next time you fish the harbour fish unweighted livies along the north eastern part of the marina....you will not get a bite on lures or anchored baits there but unweighted livies work. Threadies and cod there usually. Alternatively work the Rita DeMata headland if you can still get access to it. Threadies and barra. I fished Corio Bay and the headlands there the most....some good fish on the headlands there....very hard to land though. The reefs go out a hundred metres from the waters edge in some spots. GT's spanish macks and barra there. Occasional cobia and coral trout have come ashore there.

Sorry guys....fixed it up above to be clearerer....almost like mud now. It is what you get when the Mrs has something important to say whilst you are busy with real stuff...the lawn could have waited a minute more.....

Squid are more location oriented than tide oriented...just look for structure they would like and investigate it. As a side note...squid really like a sand bottom under them with some structure beside them....60cm of water and seem to be relaxed usually.

it is after noon...sorry bud. (April Fools) Seems to be about as good as weatherzone gets anyway....

if there is 60cm of water you will still catch them....especially when the tide starts to come in.

There are several cheap Japanese sites....there is no way of telling which ones have a better deal on any day apart from visiting them each and comparing.....they don't usually come up on search engines that well searching for products. Always good when you find that deal though.

Well I have always been a sucker for using really light lines and lightly weighted baits....until the last 4 months. Lately I have been fishing ridiculously heavy jigs with smaller that I would usually use plastics with rather surprising results. My technique isn't a whole lot different but have certainly upped the line weight and jig weights up from 3.5gm to 32 gm. I'm usinfg20-30lb braid a lot these days instead of 8lb.

Hi Hamish, only in the city reaches for me and not when I've been actually fishing.....nearly all of my Brisbane river fishing is below the gateway bridge to the bay. The guy to talk to would be Joshua Charles BrizVegas fishing....he has a couple of youtube vids of surface threadies in the bris riv.

So Raef and I did a quick run in the Brisbane River this afternoon with the winds dropping off a bit and the showers clearing. Launched at the Pinky at 3pm and fished until 7pm with plastics. My best was a snapp about 55 that was sent back....then a tailor about 50ish.....not welcome in my boat. If you want a feed of tailor go to the grain wharf at Pinkenba at night and throw anything into the lights under the wharf....you could bag out in 30 minutes easily. They all seem to be 40 to 50cm there tonight.....I wasn't interested but had to throw a lure into the lights anyway. Water quality is decent but the run made it a challenge to work the lures well....next weekend will be better tides. No photos, nothing worth the cost of the flash.

Hook up with one of the guides at Rocky...what you learn there will be applicable for the entire Qld salt water scene as far as barra and threadies goes...snapper are too easy, find a reef and throw a 90mm plastic in front of them. River togas are where it is at rather than impoundment togas....again ask the guide at Rocky for some rivers that have been fishing well. Rocky to the coast is about the best fishery along the east coast now for big fish.... If you have time spare and the weather isn't blowing it's tits off then Stanage Bay is a special place...when it fires...for me it is 2 out of 6 runs I couldn't buy a bite, the other 4 runs were excellent.

DPI research indicates that over 80% of mud crab diet is shellfish... I have grabbed a couple of fist sized bunches of bearded mussels and crunched them under foot and placed them in the pot as bait. I have done this twice in two pots, another two pots had mullet. They both worked equally well....no preference with either and both caught decent crabs. These days to can't do this in SEQ with the shellfish protection laws. I suppose it would come down to how well you can create the amino acids and blend them with oils for your attractant. Will they mix giving the correct scent??

As long as you don't cross the line of the property fences there is nothing the property owners can do. It is public land. They will raise their voices loudly but those are public parks. I used to net them for prawns for live baits, had several heated discussions with two property owners.

Every decent rain event washes prawns about sometimes all the way out of the river. In this case the prawns were schooled up on the edge of the channel about 1500m out from the mouth in salty water....the river was recovering from a flush of fresh.

2km sth of Noosa Heads and about 5m of water.