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.