Andrew_P

Mustad Big Guns 8/0s ganged with black rolling swivels. the PEtackle equivalent BFG's are pretty good too and you can buy the 8/0s open eye ready to gang ive been using the 7766 for years and recently they are noticeably softer when opening the eye for ganging. have moved over to the Big Guns and wont go back

@ellicat The Jewstopper!

Favourites here is the link. Would be great to see people add to the list!

My Toyota Corolla fits most of my fishing rods in it as well as a full esky, and tows a boat too! Haven’t seen a Rolls Royce backing down the boat ramp - yet! +1 on the stradics. The older ones were bulletproof. Saragosas are nice too. I have a Thunnus which is a beautiful baitrunner. i have Shimano overheads for trolling/reef work. From TLDs spooled with mono to Talicas with 80lb braid. Haven’t let me down. rods rods rods! I have collected a few! Anything from 50 year old Snyder Glas fibreglass to high end high modulus graphite blanks/titanium guides I’ve built myself. I’ve been building my own for a few years now and learnt pretty quick that quality is far more important than price point. I can spend up to 10 hours building a rod - why would I invest that time on cheap blank and crappy guides when I can get one down the road for $100. I started a thread on here about quality products that don’t break the budget - will see if I can find a link to it

Great spotties for the bay!

Gerres sp

Good to see someone using their noggins against the sharks! A couple of factoids from me that might add to the info: 1. Sharks and rays have ability to detect magnetic fields, whereas fin fish do not. I’d suggest that the difference in catch rate of Spanish you observed would be only from the magnet altering how the baits swim, not from magnetic fields. But I could be wrong! 2. When shark researchers were looking at developing electromagnetic deterrents to prevent shark bites on surfers and divers they were effective if they were strong enough, close enough to the potential target. But, if the shark was in “feeding mode” even the strongest magnetic field would not deter them from biting the target. so magnets, if strong enough, may put off potential shark depredation but not if the shark has decided to eat the hooked mackerel before it feels any magnetic field. I would suggest the vibrations of a hooked mackerel would overwhelm whatever field a magnet is generating from the front of the hooks. perhaps someone could patent an affordable magnetic snapper sinker for paternoster use? Lead goes for ~$8kg so if the product was slightly more expensive (say $10-12 kg) I reckon most people would go for it. @Daryl McPhee may have more info on this topic

Would love to see more of your work on here @Sylvathorn

Great work! Love the chevron fade @Sylvathorn

Show me anything in any of my posts that is twisted. which side am I on? Im a scientist and a rec fisher, so I guess I’m on the fish’s side! you can’t bash the pros and not look at yourself as a rec fisher in the mirror. It doesn’t add up.

You are correct - it is not a fair comparison given the 800k (not 80k) overwhelmingly outnumbers the total number of commercial fishers in the whole of Qld! And SM line fishers do have the same gear rules as rec fishers - 6 hooks max at a time my point is that unlike commercial fishers who have restriction on licences, have to pay for quota, have a heavily reduced TAC, the 800k rec fishers in Qld can fish for mackerel if they want. Let’s assume only the top 1% that chase mackerel are anywhere as good Neil. That’s 8000 fishers having a culmulative effect on the stock up and down the coast. And then there’s the other 99% that can fish for them too, including on charter boats with experienced skippers (pretty much the same as the commercial industry reliant on harvesting fish from the stock). it’s purely a power in numbers thing. I know this information won’t change many minds, but as long as a few people consider that there is an impact of rec fishing on fisheries resources and it is in our own best interests to help rebuild stocks then we are a lot closer to reality.

I was merely calculating what 20% of 800k rec fishers in Qld was and comparing that number to commercial fishers just to give some perspective.

Whoops! When I hear trout my mind goes straight to the GBR and the blue spotted, red variety! yes Kat the pros catch SM by line, and have experienced the same increase in shark depredation that rec fishers have. The stock assessment used a range of estimates to try to account for depredation, up to 20% (1 in 5) for the whole Qld coast, and even with this taken into account, stock level estimates were still below 20%. There is a project underway using licenced SM fishers to get a more accurate estImate of depredation rates. the thing about commercial fishers is that the Qld gov know how many fishers there are, when they fish, how many they catch and where and when they are landed. But for rec fishers this information is far more rubbery - as Neil says boat ramp surveys and rec fishing surveys (with random population sampling designs) give estimates with large variances, and are not great at capturing highly skilled, specialist fishers for hard to catch species. Which is why there is a push to improve rec fisher catch reporting in Qld. the 20% of people catching 80% of the fish is a stat that gets trotted out all the time (as well as variations like 10/90 and 5/95) and is really interesting. For perspective, there are ~ 3000 commercial fishing licences in Qld across all fisheries (line, net, trawl, pot, harvest) and our last best guess at number of rec fishers is around 800 000. So 20% of 800k is 160 000 rec fishers catching 80% of this fish. but there’s only 3000 pros in the whole state. The facts are Rec fishers dominate the catch of most key species in Qld. Apologies I’ve taken up way too much of your time so I’ll stop now. I just hope people think about the bigger picture.

Thanks Neil. I was only using the trips you reported as I am not privy to the trips you didn’t report, so my data was not flawed, but it was biased by the manner it was reported. the fact that you hooked 25 fish and landed 5 with 20 lost to sharks is not in dispute. So add the 6/6 and that is 31 fish hooked, 11 landed and 20 lost to sharks. And my comments are specifically regarding SM fishing given the management changes to rebuild the stock. whichever way you skin it, your activities are negatively impacting the stock levels at the moment, and the independently reviewed stock assessment says that it is at levels below that which can sustain itself, so management intervention (closures, bag limit change and reduction in commercial TAC) are required and the stock needs to be rebuilt. You can use all the anecdotal evidence and interviews you want, these are the best scientific estimates that we have. to look at it another way. Consider if the stock assessment is correct, and the TAC reduction, closures and bag limit changes result in rebuilding the stock back to sustainable levels - is a little bit of pain spread across all sectors worth it for the improvement of the stock? Yes your friends and family might miss out on a few feeds when the boat limit drops from 6 to 2 but you can still fish for them suppose your anecdotal estimates that the stock is fine is reality, then the shared pain of rebuilding the stock has increased the stock to a point where a regular punter has a good chance of landing a Spanish or two floating pillies on their local reef - is that such a bad thing? I think our mindset as rec fishers who resist management intervention when we have the proof that stocks are in trouble needs to change. Otherwise we will have more overfished species examples on top of snapper, pearlies and Spanish mackerel.

There have been huge restrictions on commercial shark fishing in both Qld and NSW in the last 10 years. Harvest has reduced from ~1000tonnes per year to less than 100 tonnes per year in Qld since the introduction of the S (shark) symbol. So common sense would say that shark numbers are rebuilding. Common sense would also say that because Neil hooked 25 in 2 trips that Spanish mackerel stocks are fine. This would be the case if they were evenly distributed across Qld, didn’t school to feed or spawn and were equally catchable in all conditions. Unfortunately Spanish mackerel are not evenly distributed, they are a migratory neritic (inshore) species that exhibit schooling behaviour to feed and spawn, and are “catchable” due to a range of factors including food availability, water temperature, moon phase etc. This means that someone of Neil’s experience can predict where, when and in what conditions mackerel will be able to be caught, then use his skills to target, hook and land them. The scientific term for this is “hyperstability”. Skilled fishers (rec and commercial) can maintain their catch rates even when stocks are reducing. This feature is taken into account in stock assessments. The glaring issue is that commercial catch rates of mackerel in their traditional catch locations in Nth Qld are seriously reduced, and alarm bells have actually been ringing for many years. Higher Water temps and EAC strength have got Spanish mackerel being caught 100s km south of their usual range, even off Sydney this year! The fact is they are more catchable in SE Qld now than ever before. The coral trout example is interesting. I’m sure a pro trout doryman can extract up to 100 trout in a day, if the fish are there. Just because you don’t think you could doesn’t mean others can’t. I guess what I’m trying to promote is rec fishers making good decisions and being part of the solution when it comes to rebuilding depleted stocks. Neil donates his frames and sharked heads to research and is honest about how many sharks take hooked fish, which helps scientists answer questions the improve our understanding of the stock. I also promote trusting the scientists that contribute to and produce the stock assessments, as they are the experts in the trade.

I’m not sure that explanation stacks up Bob. You can stop fishing for a species or in an area where the sharks are thick - it’s a decision the fisher can make! And I’m sure it would be a hell of a lot harder for sharks to catch 10 Spanish swimming around that weren’t already hooked by fishers. We are talking about a species with serious stock issues, and in order to land 5 fish in the last 2 trip reports, Neil says he hooked more than 25; of which 20 were lost to sharks. So that means 25 fish have been taken out of the stock so Neil can have 5 in two trips. Is it just me that sees the problem here? I want to be able to fish for Spanish into the future, but the stock won’t recover if these ratios of loss keep occurring. Think about the number of boats out chasing mackerel on your reef and multiply it up and down the coast. It’s a real issue, and fishers have the power to change their behaviour to help the stock. Failing this, we face more unpopular time closures and/or bag limit reductions, as the stock will continue to decline. It’s in our hands.

Hi Neil. So this session you landed 2 Spanish and lost about 10 others to sharks, plus hooked more and pulled or broke hooks. Assuming the ones you hooked and didn’t land due to pulled/ broken hooks lived, those 2 fish you landed resulted in the removal of 12 fish from the stock. It’s not a great success ratio is it.

I’ve eaten a whole bunch of awful things in my time (including Mac tuna) and I wouldn’t eat one of them. You are superhuman @Kat !

It’s a brown sweetlip so comes under sweetlips mls 25 in possession limit 5 Here is a link to the species id page. I would not take one to eat the flesh looks like Mac tuna. They are fun to catch cos they go like stink but they also stink like stink. I think @Kat caught a big one a couple of years back on a yabby?

+1 abu Garcia salty stage. Look out for them on sale I got mine for $115 delivered they have Fuji sic guides on them that cost close to that just for the guides

More people = more fish taken + more habitat destruction = more regulation. Pretty simple trajectory

Pretty good guess Junky! No word on the shark dna yet

a few experienced otolith interpreters at work came up with 19 - the attached picture shows which rings were counted (yellow dots). Brian you will need your 10x glasses for this! Golden snapper 8x annotated 2.bmp

I got my hands on the section of otolith the girls in the lab prepared for me. Took a couple of pics under the microscope - have a crack at counting the annual rings! I will post my interpretation up tomorrow