Soobz

Rod has held up fine. Only thing I'd do different is finer whipping, I used 80lb but 10lb would be fine.

I'd expect the OSP is better tuned, but I can tell you the knock offs I use have a great action and catch fish. I've not yet tried on YFW but I've painted a couple up for the next session.

Myponga is your best bet right now I reckon, big schools in there, but harder without a yak. If shore based I'd be trying a fair way west of the car park as it's pretty shallow a quite a way out from the shore on most of the southern banks of the ressie.

Never even seen one diving over there.

Red eyes no problem. Can do any type of eye really.

11 hours ago, Territory Lad said:

That sugarpen blank looks interesting!

It's my take on local nipper colours. The lines came out thicker than I wanted so I'll remake the stencil.

Mass production! A school of pished pillies

Why so many? Well I am marketing them as a fashion accessory, catches fishies and the ladies!

I think I've found a clear coat I like but it takes a week to set so it's yet to be proven but it's way better than the other epoxy I tried. Marine varnish was a complete failure for durability, hook rash was terrible.

No big surf near Port Vincent, any sinker will do there. Weather is good next week so even going much further south you should be fine. There are salmon along the coast further south if you can find em and get to their feeding zone. Also it's not hard to duck across the other side of YP for a day trip.

Hmm, tried that with no real result. I'll send ya some hard bits to see cos I gave up and froze em for bait

I've had squid tentacles in a salad style in restaurants, so I had a go at trying to clean them today. There are little hard bits in the suction cups that I tried to scrape out, without success, and cutting the suction cups off is tedious and leaves the tentacles rather mangled. Has anyone got a method or are these restaurant tentacles from a different type of squid? I'm good at the wings these days and I don't like wastage.

Yeah, planning to drop in to SFS on the way home tomorrow. The 8'6 Daiwa TD Hyper looks interesting too, but no local stock that I can find.

Tried the Rovex at BCF, not too bad considering the price. They didn't have the Samaki.

I guess what I'm really after is a long casting lightweight rod that has good action for lighter lures.

Yeah that's my surf rod

Does anyone use an "Egi" rod as a light surf rod? I've got a 10'6 surf rod that casts a mile and is reasonably capable as a light tackle rod ie. for pan fish, but a tad heavy to be casting a lot. I'm thinking I need (not want, neeed) a lighter weight rod for land fishing where I need a slight more casting distance when targeting smaller fish and squidlies from land. I'm purely guessing an egi rod is fairly lightweight? Something around 8'6-9' similar to my Infeet 732 LFS I reckon might be good, but it's just a theory. I'm after peoples thoughts and suggestions.

The thing with veggie scraps is the decomposition creates heat which the worms hate and until it's decomposed they can't eat it as they feed off the bacteria. The exception is bananas and some other fruits which break down extremely fast. I feed mine compost that is mostly done but still moist.

Way back in the day I recall thinking squid was just as good as cockles, certainly me dad did. I think cockles work well cos they wave around and attract attention, which is why I think tenderized squid works better.

Actually, at the risk of a thread hijack I wonder what lures gar might take then I don't need to worry about bait.

Fine, so I'm going garfishing tomorrow it seems.

Oh I forgot, the other thing I almost caught on the pished pilly, but glad I didn't, was an albatross. It picked up the lure on the surface and flew off, I thought oh shit and wondered whether to jerk the line or not but it dropped it after a few seconds. I thought it must have worked out it wasn't a fish but as soon as it hit the water it dived back after it and I had to crank fast lol. Then again, I could have found out what flavour albatross is

2 hours ago, doobie said:

And a squid on the lure - stupid squid  

Oh I dunno, it's as sexy as hell.

2 hours ago, Softy said:

Nice work! Gotta be a pretty good feeling catching them on your own lures!

Yeah, it's extremely satisfying, especially as I tweaked the design of the middle hook eye and it held on a ~40cm salmon spinning me 720 degrees on the yak - it's interesting the salmon mostly hit the centre hooks too.

Spent the weekend at Edithburgh. Apparently the plastered pilchard (pseudo bent minnow) works ludicrously well:

Yep even a squid took the lure. Total for the was 10 snook, best 56cm, 10 salmon best 40cm, and 1 squid (more on the trad lures). Taking orders lol!

On 06/02/2021 at 3:46 PM, keenfisho said:

Looking good mate, let me know on the crank baits, I can never have enough lure candy

I'll post up excess down the track, certainly will be doing some 'no longer available' Daiwa RPM brown craw inspired, but anything else people can no longer buy but have a desire for would be a good challenge. One of my aims is to paint up our own local SA bait fish so trying to match a design is good practice.

Inspired by a frustration of not being able to buy lures in the colours I want (popular = sold out) and also wanting to tweak some designs, and by the need to build something to understand it, I have foolishly picked up yet another hobby.

I was going to start with wooden lures as I'm already set up for those, but the fear of mucking up the paint job on a wooden lure that I've spent hours on I decided to start with blank plastics which are very cheap.

eg. A bent minnow copy is about $2

BTW, it's not a great copy, the Chinese penchant for price ahead of attention to detail means the centre eye is a piss poor screw in so I had to make a new eye, drill a suitable hole and epoxy it in. The surface is not textured like a bent minnow, but I have a solution for that down the track. None of these lures are tuned either.

Anyway, they are good for painting practice. I bought a cheap airbrush, tweaked it a little per youtube and voila I got a semi reasonable result and learned a heap in the process.  I especially learned that the less than optimal epoxy from AMC doesn't flow all that well and despite using a rotisserie and a heat gun it was hard to get a smooth surface.

So here's the early attempts.

Happy with the yabby. The earlier version I realized was more coloured like a cooked yabby

But perhaps fish like cooked ones too .

Having enough fun that I may invest in a better airbrush.

I've done a bulk order of crankbaits to practice painting on, which I will likely sell at cost if someone is looking for a specific pattern:

I stopped being able to eat crays and prawns at Xmas a long time ago - and that's half the problem, they are so expensive some people stretch the budget and 'treat' themselves just once a year, and the rest of the time our natural resources are exported. I agree that the "natural resources" should be able to be enjoyed by all, but snapper are were catchable on a $30 rod/reel combo from shore.

The thing with that argument is fishing around KI is rated as very good still. I'd be taking anything a pro fisher told me with a bag of salt, and the neighbour fished Vincent area at Xmas and bagged out on most fish including squid. I'm not saying fur seal numbers don't need to be considered but we need to learn to fit within the world instead of thinking it belongs to us entirely. I'd rather the Gov focuses on removing long lines.