Hello all

Coastbusters wrote: I am looking to spool up my boat reel for livebaiting for kingfish on the flats in the harbour. What size line and leader do you recommend? I assume mono, not braid. The reel is a Torium 30.

Hey CB,

Torium 30 should run 15kg mono perfectly - or 10kg if you wanted to make it a fair fight! for leader material I’d probably run 100 pound if fishing the 15kg mainline or 60 pound Fluro on the 10kg mono.

Suggest tying a Bimini twist into your mainline to create a ‘double’, then use the doubled line to tie a uni knot onto a swivel. This just helps maintain as much line strength as possible as the Bimini twist has a higher breaking point than a uni tied using a single piece of mainline. The uni tied as a double should then strong than the Bimini...

Cheers!

Shot out in my 14 footer on Monday and after a fair bit of running around dropped the pick about 400 yards east of A beacon in 50 ft of water. Nice little current and only needed a 1 oz sinker.Also dropped a ledger rig a bit out the back. Limit of pannies 34-36 cm plus a bloody big gurnard in just over an hour. Dead low tide when I got back to the ramp and forgot how slippery it is. Too bloody old to be going flat on my arse. Still,nothing broken so a good day.

Bowentown Harbour, id never think i’d ever see the day to catch a gurnard in that harbour. well it happened. daytime fishing it was, 2pm+ as sunny as anything. 6 Snaps a GURNARD and 3 trevs also lost a horse of a trevally trying to bleed it [DOH].
great fishing for the day, strong tides too. also caught a snapper on a flasher rig which was double weird. anyway here’s some pics to get jealous over
gurnard was 40cm too
ALSO left the fish BITING HARD
kept what we needed, few rat kingfish following the trevs too

Nice Catch Pullsiki, Thanks for sharing old Photo. I wonder wot the fish trap set up looked like? 

Nice work! You were lucky - the Firth of Thames at the same time yesterday had 15+ boats with barely 1 fish each.

Friday night up in the shallows slow going for 5 snapper 3 of which were empty, skinny with  very soft dead white flesh (what there was of it). Water temp was 24 degrees up there. A week earlier we got our limit all in good nick plus a nice trev. Will now flag the snapper away til mid Feb.

Had a great day on Saturday out by Plate.  Fishing wasn't that great but returned with 4 lovely fat snapper around 5 ponds which was enough for us.  Were fishing in 50 metres and the fish were in amazing condition compared to earlier posts about harbour caught fish in poor condition.  Maybe it's the colder deeper water that determines flesh condition.  Even had a 2 metre mako come and bump the outboards a couple of times!