yellow door 1

Here's what was going wrong first time round

First time round - everything was frozen and not enough stuff in the bucket. Everything was just getting flung around like a tornado - This time I thawed everything first and added more ingredients

Yeah I've never lost that much money in a session but I used to have a 3 ecogear a session limit - after that, I'd finish it out with soft plastics.

I used to fish everyday after work and throw hard body lures for bream on shallow rock banks. At the time I was using ecogear sx40's and if you lost 3 of those in a session - it would start to add up - and if you were doing it five days a week and twice on the weekend - it really added up. So it was losing ecogears that made me search out cheaper alternatives. When strikepro came out with an almost identical copy for half the price - I switched to those and didnt noticed a drop in catch rates. Thats started my search for even cheaper lures. By the end of my serious "breaming on lures" I was using HB lures that cost 1/10th of the ecogears and still catching fish. Sure some needed to be tuned out of the box and some needed treble upgrades - but in the lightweight catergory - you can spend much less and still catch fish. These days my softplastics cost 5c each instead of $2 - My blades cost $2 instead of $20 - and my jigheads are between 10c and 50c. The down side to the cheapest tackle can usually be over come with a hook sharpening file or some tuning with the pliers. I understand alot of people dont have time for that - but you can work miracles pretty quick on a lure that may not last the first cast let alone multiple sessions

As its bucketing down in Melbourne - I figured I do a walk through of my "Tackle Tip"

Yeah that last one is a bit suss but would also be pretty handy in some situations

Yeah some of the big hook manufacturers encourage you to use a hook only once - my 10c jobs can last 3 sessions being mauled by pinkies and still be needle sharp with no rust

With rods and reels I tend to stick with Daiwa Shimano Pfluegars and Abu. I used to spend more but these days I dont like spending over $125 on either a rod or reel - but I will stretch that for some of my light lure set ups. (no more than $200) My braid and fluoro is Kast King - Super cheap and has passed all my strength and in the field tests. I can top shot my reels with 100m of braid for about $4 with a limp braid, that out performs braids 20 times the price I use alot of plastic lures these days and most of them are just cheapies off ali express or ebay - I did go through a phase of using ZMans to over come rips and tears on small pinkies but little pinks still rip of a zman single tail. So i just went back to cheapies Jigs heads are ALi express and abay cheapies for the most part - I just use a diamond file to put a needle point on them and they do the job Same with weedless hooks and bait hooks - all aliexpress/ebay cheapies - I run them through some pretty rigorous testing with scales and in water longevity test - there are some primo quality hooks out there that are 20 times cheaper. And I tend to tinker around making some of my own stuff like floats weighted weedless hooks and sinkers

Yeah the only attention I pay to moons is how they effect the timing of the tides I'll fish any night as long as the tides are right

Ahh I see - I was on the wrong track imagining you were casting out into the middle of a river. Yeah when I fish wharfs for them - first I do recon to find a spot where the biggest schools of bait hang out at night - then I burley all session and set one livie at 1.5m down and the other at 3m. I like to Burley half a teaspoon at a time, every 5 mins over the session, Helps to build the bait school bigger/ keeps it flashing and darting around / keeps scent in the water and gives me something to do while waiting for a hit. I even used to experiment with splashing 10 litre buckets of water over a wide area to simulate surface activity. Cant say for sure whether this helped - but on some nights it definitely didnt hurt. Especially when the little pack hunting Jewies were charging through the surface bait schools

or closer to this

Great info there Jackmac - What did you use to keep your mullet off the bottom and where did you put the hooks into your livies?

I've got a mate who sets an alarm on his phone and watches the water to make sure its gone slack - then he casts - he likes the the exact second the incoming tide starts. He doesnt want to put lures infront of fish that arent ready to feed yet I'm a bit more relaxed - I'll take any stage of incoming tide. But I prefer it to happen around dusk. With lures - I usually put 12 casts in to a spot before moving on to the next. But with livies - I'll sit it out and a 3- 4 hour session is long enough to let me know if they were going to hit or not. I really start to focus on the rod tips once darkness begins to fall - thats mainly because I've caught all my livies and I've got nothing better to do - but change of light and the hour or 2 after, are when I do my most intense staring at tips. I do like weak incoming tides in the most of the spots I fish. Theres always exceptions where the complete opposite is true - like a bottleneck where bait is forced out on an out going tide. But as a general rule - incoming tide at dusk is what I go for