yellow door 1

Went with the hose clamp in the end - It allows you to orientate the torch for single handed button access

may aswell leave this here aswell - could be handy for more than just reddies
 

Pvc mount for the torch

A mate sent me this dehooker - interesting set up
 

Ive never used a real one - just vice grips or free hand for flasher style rigs on 1/0 to 5/0.

I have heard its difficult to find a vice that handles both tiny fly hooks and large saltwater hooks.

Im all about diy and multi use items - so the vice grips are great for uncomplicated flies like flashers.

but none of the tools are completely necessary for flashers - please excuse the overly cropped footage - But you'll get the idea of a free hand attempt
 

Just an update - more for myself than anything 

-  I scattered tuna oil soaked, mushed up chook pellets around the trap - just a couple of teaspoons - (I didnt want tuna oil in my traps because they would stink out the car) - I figured the oil slick would help the mullet find it, as it was too windy for me to wade around and spot them. 

I think this really hurt my chances - the oil slick made the traps very visible from the air - both seagulls and terns have evolved over thousands of years to look for slicks - and I reckon that helped them find the traps much quicker than they would have.

Might be ok in still conditions where the slick wouldnt be so visible - but in the wind, it was very obvious.

A youtube guy mentioned if birds are a problem, you can draw them away by feeding them bread on the beach after you have set your traps.

But Im going to have to get sneaky to make these traps perform - unfortunately alot of my mullet spots close to home, have very poor land based access to the water - steep walls and knee deep sludge - and these traps need to be retrieved by hand. So its not going to be quite as easy as it looks on all the videos where the seagulls are all super well behaved.

Might have to add a few extra KMs to my trips to find suitable waters

Bit of a learning curve on the new mullet trap-

only thing that likes these traps more than mullet is seagulls -  if you walk more than 10ms away - the seagulls swarm them and stick their heads in for the bread.

Even had a few terns grabbing the mullet before they could get in.

But the fact that 2 found their way past the flock of birds guarding the entrance, was very encouraging - . Had to leave early as a gale was steaming in -but now that I know I have to shoe the birds away - it could be a goer

Out of the hundreds of mullet that saw it tonight - only a few let me know that my lure choice and retrieves were interesting enough to hit but not enough to inhale.

15 hours ago, Des said:

Thanks Man  I knew you would find some 

Yes I do go wading at night on a few occasions. I always see them skipping along on the surface. However they are the smaller juveniles. 

No worries - yeah it seems no retrieve could be too violent when the prawns are in full panic mode.

Fish are much better at tracking stuff through the air than I first thought.

I remember being on a 3 story boat that takes tourist snorkeling up north - my mate left her camera on the second story, near where I was and asked me to get it.

It was a cheap disposable with a float - so I threw it near her, off the balcony - she got swamped by all sorts of reef fish. I could see them tracking the camera as soon as it left my hands.

The staff on those boats throw fish scraps off the side to feed them, so they are well trained to investigate stuff thrown into the water. But from a birds eye view - it was interesting to see how well they can see up through the surface of the water. And how quickly they can lock onto an airbourne target
 

16 hours ago, doobie said:

I'm a basic fish cooker.

Generally just some S&P and maybe some lemon juice.

Sometimes will use some instant batter mix for more of crunch.

Have a deep fryer but not used much due to having to put 3lt of oil in just to have it at a minimum level  

Yeah in the past, Ive tended to keep things simple and I was mainly catch and release for alot of years. So I didnt have a chance to get bored of my recipes.

But since discovering redfin are delicious, Ive been thinking of branching out

They are some Mighty tasty looking recipes Des - thanks for passing them on

I’m having a bit of a crackdown on my hands getting unnecessarily stinky at the moment

and my fingers now have a faint whiff of rubber instead of fish

3 hours ago, MAH said:

I do a similar thing. When my partner deems the bath towels are too old/worn and need replacing, I take them and cut them into 3-4 hand towel sizes, overlock the edges to stop them fraying and sew on a small loop to attach a carabiner. A couple of bath towels makes 6-8 fishing towels. I've got a box full of fishing towels, and take one for handling fish and another for wiping my hands. I give them soak in napisan/sodium percarbonate when I get home as they get pretty stinky and my partner doesn't appreciate me chucking them into the laundry basket.

 

 

Very Nice - Yeah I think I'll add a loop- I was just going to chuck the whole thing in the washing machine but the carbeena might hook on to something in there and wreak havoc.

Worked out really well tonight - didnt have to touch a mullet - no more stinky hands on the steering wheel. And no more slime wiped on my clothes

Ended up just rinsing it under the tap and I'll give it a sniff test to morrow to see what extra needs to be done -

Thanks for the tips on cleaning and separate towels for different jobs - makes alot of sense

after mucking around with those slimey mullet the other night - the time has come for a dedicated fishing rag with caribeena

Heres a little snippet where they are more panicked 
 

3 hours ago, Des said:

@yellow door 1 finds all sorts of YouTube videos. 

See if you can find one of fleeing prawns  

I have looked and can't seem to find any

Maybe try prawning vids - where guys go at night with lights and underwater cameras - you'd see a variety of fleeing I imagine

Or a night wade over the flats would give you a first hand view and maybe get a tasty feed of gars and prawns

4 hours ago, yellow door 1 said:

 

 

So the mullet will have to suffer

Not as many suffered as I’d hoped but it was a bit of fun working them out. Ended up covering about a km and polaroiding new schools when the bight slowed
 

I could only pull 2 or 3 from a school before they shut down.  And they didn’t respond to burley for long before leaving. Even mullet can be tricky when they want to be

but hopefully the snapper recognise these and know what to do with them

2 hours ago, Kelvin said:

Interesting. Must be the smell and oil content

Today is burley making day for me. I'm about to a heap of redfin scraps and small redfin into burley blocks

Yeah something was off. I expected much more interest on the yabbies. Other guys have had success on them - I just couldnt make them work

Even the salting process didn’t spice up the reddy chunks enough to make them tasty
 

I’ve just got back from scoping a mullet spot. Plenty there but I didn’t have my gear

just salted up a batch of chicken to try to secure a few for snapper baits. The local creek is still too mozzy infested to consider going for carp. Even during the day

So the mullet will have to suffer

51 minutes ago, Kelvin said:

Small yabbies work well for bream and Snapper also love prawns. I would have thought they would work well for snapper and potentially hold on the hook a bit better than pilchard.

Did you try whole yabbies or just the tails?

Any bigger snapper?

Nah we found a few schools but they were all tiny pinkies - So I I just ripped the tails off and used those with the shells still on - they might have been a bit big for the little pinkies to swallow.

But they werent getting anywhere near the amount of bights as the pilchard cubes. I gave them about an hour to prove themselves as my mates were pulling in little pinks consistently on the pilly cubes.

I had cut up redfin cubes the same size as the pillies, out on another rod and they were basically getting ignored aswell.

Withing seconds of my first pilly cube hitting the bottom I was on after not catching a fish in the first hour.

So on bigger fish, the results may be different  - but the fact that little ravenous pinkies all but ignored them werent the results I was after -

Salted carp, on the other hand, can usually hold its own against pilly cubes- those were the sort of results I was after

Got a window in the weather tomorrow morning - and Ive added another freshwater bait for the snappers consideration

12 hours ago, dmck said:

We have all been deceived.  We have been led to believe ''climate change' meant global warming......

Things do seem to be getting more extreme. 

2 hours ago, Softy said:

I don't think we will ever have good weather again....  

Haha - I genuinely thought I was coming down with some mystery illness - turns out i was just cold and hadnt checked the forecast for a few days