4liters wrote: ↑Wed Jan 29, 2020 9:08 pm
After my debacle of a effort at Portland over the long weekend I decided that I needed a backup source of fresh baits and/or livies when the water was too stirred up for squid to be a realistic target in a short bait collecting session before targeting something a bit higher up the food chain.
Gars (being kingy candy) seem like a sensible target, apparently being available almost anyplace where there is shallow water and a weed covered seafloor. Unfortunately I'm crap at catching them.
Most people I've spoken to say they're the easiest fish in the bay to catch but I've struggled to get more than one or two over any entire day.
To get some practice I went to the Grammar School Lagoon today to have a crack at them. First stop was close to the moorings, I anchored up and got the burley going. Pretty soon there were a bunch of minnows in the burley trail and a school of pinkies mooching in the 2m deep, crystal clear water. No gars though, and weed pretty quickly became an issue as the tide pushed clumps of seagrass into my lines, fouling the hooks.
Next stop was near the mouth of the channel, the weed was still a bit of an issue but a potentially bigger issue was that the wind was 90 degrees to the current flow and it was blowing my float out of the berley trail. After 40min or so of not catching a thing it was time to move again.
Final stop was over at Avalon. It's not a huge trip across from the lagoon, and this time I started drifting rather than anchoring. This was a bit more successful - I was moving in roughly the same speed and direction as the weed so it wasn't getting dragged into my lines nearly as much, the burley trail went straight out in the direction I had drifted from, and the float and unweighted hook I had out were both right in the middle of the trail. Not only that, I could see gars in the trail from time to time, and I even caught a few.
The problems with this approach were that I was plagued by tommy ruff and micro pinkies, and most of the smaller gars were not hitting the baits for some reason - the only ones I got were quite big with the red beaks, which isn't a problem as such but for bait I'd rather have lots of smaller ones rather than a couple of big ones.
My rigs:
Unweighted size 12 Gama longshank, drifted back down the trail
Size 12 Gama under a Gillies quill float, weighted down with 2 split shot sinkers so only the top quarter or so of the float was above the surface
Burley was chook pellets and tuna oil, wetted with a bit of water so it went all mushy.
Bait was small (less than 5mm) squares of PPB IQF pilchards.
Some thoughts:
I wonder if my burley was fine enough? There were some larger chunks coming out of the bucket and I'm not sure if that was feeding the gars too much. Next time I'm going to put the water and pellets into the food processor to make sure they're really fine and see if that makes a difference. I'm keen to hear what others think about this.
Are my hooks too big? They look like they should fit in the mouth of a fairly small gar but maybe they're a bit sensitive to hook size/bait size?
Will they swallow a moving bait? Drifting worked better than anchoring for me today, but 4 gars from 7 hours of fishing is a far cry from a quick bait collecting session. Does anyone else do it this way? Or is it generally better to anchor.
When anchored, how do people deal with the wind, weed, current etc. I can see it working well enough in a location where there is sufficient current flow to keep the kayak, berley trail and lines all lined up but in the low flow parts of the bay like pretty much all of Corio Bay is it still viable?
Here's some pics from the day. There's something wrong with the camera in my phone, it's struggling to focus properly for some reason. It didn't look like there was any crap on the lens so maybe it's just been dropped a few too many times.
You can see the size of some of the burley bits in this shot, is that too big?
I got a nice flatty on a plastic while drifting (another reason I'd love to get better at this method of catching gars)
Obligatory sink pic
Pinkies
Minnows sheltering next to the yak. I scooped a few up in my landing net and used some as bait but nothing showed any interest
4-5
Anyway, I'm interested in hearing peoples' thoughts.