The little hard fighters

It’s known that bream are the hardest fighters for their body length. Whiting and flathead are other species of fish you can catch when bream fishing and you could even pick up a trevally or two. To fish for bream you need light tackle but it should be good quality. The rod depends on how you plan to catch them, live bait or frozen bait would be a fibreglass rod, hardbodys would need a graphite or graphite core rod and soft plastics would definitely need a graphite rod. Bream are very picky so if you’re using bait take multiple baits, if you’re using lures take a variety of styles and colours, when using soft plastics in the local river I prefer chartreuse and pumpkin seed type colours. When I use hardbodys I go for a ‘Sebile’ rattsler because their body shape resembles that of a baitfish, I would use it in natural shiner or natural golden shiner. The rod I have for this is a Diawa d-shock graphite medium action with a Shakespeare synergy two multi spool reel. I like the multi spool because you can have light line for bream and whiting then something heavier for flathead. The key to finding bream in any situation is structure structure structure!!. looke for fallen trees or rocky pillars and you should find some nice bream.

An even better exploration

First of all sorry for the lack of blog updates, the river is in flood and I was busy with end of year school work. The recent kayak exploration was paddling to the mangroves and fishing for barramundi. This time was just like it except we went further into the back creek systems, yes I say we because I take a mate it is a lot safer when there is two people. we started off at a dirt boat ramp and while our kayaks floated in the water waiting to set off on the epic journey my mate and I tried on our lures, my lure of choice was a koolie minnow natural shine. Once again my lure of choice is made by Sebile but if you ever get your hands on one of these fantastic lures you will know why. The lure was 76mm long and ready to snatch up whatever would jump at it. My friend used a rattsler to help me test them out and on his second line had a rapala but once again the Sebile did him good and his lure wasn’t even needed. All my sebiles go into a lure cabinet I made to show off their battle scares and remind me of their battles until the next time I take them out to the water. After the lures were on we set off for the on paddle to the back creaks of the tidal causeway lake. Once we got to the area that Barra were originally caught we anchored and cast up close to the roots of the mangroves, the Barra dig holes in these root systems and hide there until the baitfish (in this case our lures) swim past and bam we have one on our line. This time only small Barra were caught but that wasn’t surprising because the water looked like tea but we did catch some mangrove jack and type of large toothy herring. We dropped a crab pot in and then pulled our anchors out and went to a bank to have lunch.  After lunch we checked the pot and the crab bait had been munched and shredded but no crabs so that was odd. After that our luck went on a downfall because no matter what lure we put on the fish didn’t seem to want it. So that was the end of another day as we paddled back to the boat ramp. Yet another Sebile was added to the lure rack.

choosing your lure the right way

Sebile, magic swimmer mullet

Match the hatch to the catch is generally a fly fishing terminology but none the less applies to all different styles of fisherman whether it is bait, fly’s or lures. Today matching lures to the catch will be the main aspect of my blog. The first thing to do is grab a cast net, give it a few throws in your favourite fishing spot and see what you get in the net. Snap a few pictures of the bait that appears more often than not, for example in my area mullet whiting and herrings appear the most. Now don’t go rushing off to buy your lures just yet. Try the live bait and see what it can pick up. Most types of mullet and white bait work best. Now getting on to selecting the right lure. The lure should represent these fish in not only body shape and colour but movement and swimming depth as well. Mullet mainly swim along the top water so your better with a small lip or slow sinking or suspending lure anything that will keep it in the top water.  Now size is a matter of opinion, do you believe that the target fish (the one you’re trying to catch) will go for the smallest of the baitfish school as any easy catch or the biggest one because it’ll be more filling. Sebile lures design and manufacture the best range of hard body lures on the market I have ever seen. The lures have incredible detail and colours which is what you need to get the fishes attention. The Sebile magic swimmer is a close shape and swim pattern to a mullet and in this range they have many different colours for different fishing and the colours are not hard to match, the colour I have chosen is MULLET.

koolie minnow nat. dark blue black

 Another great colour in that range is natural shine which represents most white bait you can find in your local area.  Sebile has more than 10 different style of lures which is a lot compared to most brands. The lure designs and colours would cater for any fisherman  for example if I wanted a pillie I would get a koolie minnow in natural dark blue black and that would give you a day of fun for anything from trevally to flathead.

Causeway mangroves

On a Sunday morning me and my mate Rhett launched our kayaks off a bank at the kiosk side off the causeway. We first dropped off the crab pot to a mangrove coated bank where I flicked a prawn coloured soft jerk bait and my mate used a Sebile crankster. He got a hit and run on the third cast which left the lure savagely scratched. After having nearly no luck after that we trolled bibbed minnows over to a mangrove creek area. We both threw out a baited line and flick

kayaks at a stop to explore the surrounding area
for hidden structure that keen bara live in.

ed lures on a lighter rod. On one of the first casts of the crankster hooked up on a nice little barra which was quickly released. The crankster got a few more hits without hook ups while the softies were left untouched. Rhett swapped over to a 95mm magic swimmer cast it out and made the lure dance and jiggle through the water resulting in a nice 56cm barra. No other lures worked as well as the two sebiles which activated the predatory instinct of the barra. I can’t wait to get back out on the water again with my mate so we can go and target more barra in the back creeks of the causeway. Till next time.

A Trevally Of A Time

running sinker rig

I started to put a running sinker rig my home made 7 foot rod blank. The reel I had on it was a Penn accord 6000 size reel. The bait I was using on this rod was a whole pilchard, the pilchard was hooked through the eye and then several other times through its body so the rough surf wouldn’t rip it off. On my Rovex airstrike graphite bait caster and Rovex Oberon bc reel I had a 4 inch fluoro yellow curl tail grub on a 2 gram jig head. The place I was fishing was the Yeppoon side of Corio Bay up in the Byfield National Park. The 7 foot rod with the Penn reel kept getting big bites but the current kept dragging the bait out of the gutter so I walked around to the waterpark (fishing creek) and cast out the grub on my bait caster and by the end of a couple of casts in this strong current I got one decent sand flathead and one barely legal bream. The tide had reached its turning point so I quickly put out the 7 foot rod and Penn combo into action with the running rig and pilchard and got many bites then finally started landing some trevally. By that end of the time there were some nice trevally fillets. Make sure when you fillet trevally that you cut out all the red meat from the white meat because it’s not healthy for you.

Fabulous Flathead

One afternoon at Lammermoor beach in Yeppoon I decided I would trial a few new lures. The minnow type hard bodied lures had no success neither did any soft plastic. Before I decided to leave I changed over to a pink panther Tassie Devil lure. On the third cast off the rocks on the mangrove side of the beach I used a faster retrieve resulting in a nice little GT patrolling over the rocky bottom. Latter I hooked up on a rock cod that stuck to the bottom like a suction cup darting between rocks. I waded out to a rocky platform where I flicked the lure out in every direction.  I decided to work the lure across the bottom at a very slow speed next to the platform rock. In a flash a huge lizard drew it’s camouflaged head out of the sand and crunched down on the fluttering lure. The 60cm flathead was only 2 meters away from where I was standing but took me five minutes to land. From that moment on I have had great respect for my Tassie Devil lures and they are highly valued amongst my lure collection.

By Rhett Thorne (Friend & valued co-fisherman of Clayton)

The Elusive Flathead

some 40 odd cm duskies

Wether you are trying to catch lizard on live bait or soft plastics the one thing you must have is a heavy leader as flathead live on the bottom of the water with the snags and rocks and various other structures. When chasing flathead on lures you cant beat a 3-4 inch curl tailed grub in more vibrant colours like pink, fluro greens and yellows work well too. The grub can be matched to a 1/16 ounce (roughly 2 gram) jighead head with a size one or two hook. When using bait small whiting hooked through the lower jaw will work extremely well and little mullet hooked through the tail will also send you drag spinning. brightly coloured shallow diving minnows and jerk shads are also magic on dusky and sand flathead, just match the water depth with the diving size so you can get the hard body lure as close to the bottom as possible. Flathead should be targeted on half tides and leading out from a high tide. the flatties will normally rest in the small channels on the flats or in the drop offs just before them, on low tide it pays to walk around the flats and see all the sink holes from where they were resting. if you have any queries about flathead or any other fish feal free to email me at clay94_fishing@live.com.au

pesky little catches on bait can annoy
you when you have a specific fish in mind



the recent exploration

My friend and I hiked around a saltwater lake ( the causeway for those who know it). We were equipped with a bag full of lures and various other things, such as wallets and phones and chips, can’t forget them. My friend was using and okuma graphite travel and I had a Rovex airstrike bc with a Rovex oberon bc reel. The first fish caught was a ‘long tom’ just off the base bridge on a silver, gold and black popper. It was caught by my mate by using a normal blooping retrieve. With very limited success we decided to hike around the outside waters casting out yabby soft plastics as we went along the mangrove banks. Every now and then we switched to different lures like suspending, shallow diving, x-raps and other vibrant coloured minnows. More luck was achieved when a 'bloody ripper' Tassie Devil. When it was quickly retrieved and a barracuda or another high speed predator smashed it and literally disabled the lure before I could even hook it. We kept on moving around the inside of the lake to more pristine waters but mainly stuck to the shallow clear waters in fear of stone fish. with the sun blazing on our backs no fish were out to play so we hiked back to the beach side of the lake on the other side of the 'bridge' where it was a slow flowing low tide. We  put on the yabby soft plastics and used a double twitch retrieve, letting them sink between the twitches. This way they aggressively dart up through the water columns then flutter down to the bottom. This worked like magic hooking up to heaps of pike and the occasional flathead. I would have to say that pike were the most fun to catch because of they’re large size and fast predatory skills.

Thanks to all who read my first blog and i will be updating it at least weekly with fishing tips and stories and other adventures.