It’s not looking like the type of weather you want for venturing off shore this weekend, with strong winds and big seas predicted.
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A good weekend to spend some time doing maintenance of your fishing gear and tidying up the tackle box for the off-shore anglers.
The good thing about living and fishing in the Shoalhaven is there are some great options for sneaking a fish in when the winter westerly winds are blowing.
There are reports of some solid bream being caught in the Shoalhaven and Crookhaven rivers. All you need to do is find a spot out of the westerly wind.
Look for deep holes to fish into or rock walls to fish alongside for the bream.
Focus on fishing the last hour of the run out and then for the first hour of the run up tide and vice versus for the high tide.
One of the tricks with bream fishing is to use as light a sinker as possible to get your bait to the bottom.
As for bait you can’t go past live yabbies or squirt worms this time of year, fresh fillets of slimy mackerel or any other oily fish like striped tuna also work well.
Other bream fishing options are prospecting around the snags and other structure using soft or hard bodied lures in our rivers and creeks, like Broughton Creek, Mosquito Creek (back of Lake Wollumboola) and Currambene Creek.
With your hard bodies lures, like the Jackal Cubbys cast them tight into the structure and slowly wind them out with a few pauses and twitches of the rod tip.
As for soft plastics is pretty hard to go past the 80mm Squidgie Wriggler Tail in the blood worm colour.
A good set of sunglasses like the Tonics are really handy when lure fishing for bream as you can often spot them holding in the snag or cruising the weed beds. You can then sight cast to the fish and hopefully see them engulf your lure.
Big tip, when using hard bodies lures is to ensure that you hooks are high quality and razor sharp, that way you won’t miss a hook up when a big bream has a crack at your lure.
If you catch a big bream I encourage you to handle the fish with care, get a great picture and then release the fish.
Why? The big bream are the breeding stock so it’s important they go back into the water to ensure a sustainable bream population, in other words it’s about fishing for the future.
When the wind eases there are plenty of southern calamari (squid) around close in-shore or in Jervis Bay.
Squid or egi (a Japanese term for squid) is becoming increasing popular with tackle manufactures now making specialised egi outfits, however any light rod and reel combo will do the trick.
And why wouldn’t squid fishing be popular, they are great fun to catch, especially for youngsters, they taste great and big kingfish like them as trolled slowly around their usual haunts.
One of the most important things about squid fishing is the jigs.
Now you can spend around $5 to $10 at a tackle store for a jig and you’ll still catch squid, however using Japanese jigs like Yo-Zuri, Yamashita and Harimitsu will catch you more and better quality squid.
For those who know me, know that I’m big fan of The Phantom comics, so it comes with no surprise that one of my favourite coloured squid jig is purple, natural patterns, hot pink and orange coloured jigs also work well.
Just experiment with colours on the day to find out what the squid are taking a fancy to.
A good rule of thumb is bright day bright coloured lure, dark day dark coloured lure.
When fishing for squid look for depths of anything over 1m to about 10m, with broken ground, weed and sand on the bottom.
These tasty critters love to hide in among weed and sea grass.
As for technique, have a look at some of the instructional videos on-line (i.e YouTube) and search for squid, southern calamari or egi fishing.
Have fun fishing for the squid and try to avoid getting inked.
You know you’ve you had a successful day egi fishing when you and the boat are covered in their ink.
Here is a good tip for removing the ink off you and your boat, use dish washing liquid or Johnson’s No More Tears shampoo, it works a treat.
Tight lines,
Steve “Jonno” Johnson