Biggest fish in tunaverse
down to the bottom — came up tight on a salmon; others followed.
There are squid to be caught on both sides of the Corio Bay outer harbour with Neil Slater picking up a respectable catch in four metres of water off Avalon on Saturday, while on Friday, Andrew Johnson and Dennis O’Brien picked up another half a dozen off Clifton Springs that included a couple approaching 2kg.
Following their squid capture, Andrew and Dennis tried for the whiting, but initially, the fish they caught — while probably legal size — were all returned. That all changed as the sun went down though, with an additional catch of fifteen fish around the 38cm mark.
Lachlan Doody, and his son, Jarvis 12 — both dedicated cod anglers from Mildura — fished Lake Toolondo with Trevor Holmes of Victorian Inland Charters last week.
A successful trip as it turned out for young Jarvis caught his first ever trout, and Lachlan, the biggest of several redfin at 46cm.
Making a freezing daybreak start on Lake Fyans near Stawell last week, Kevin Wild and partner Amber Stone caught a dozen redfin to 40cm, first trolling Fish Arrows, then casting soft plastics.
John Clements of Lake Purrumbete Holiday Park reports that fishing on the lake has been quiet, but Warren Stanford picked up a nice brown of 2.7kg, while Maz Stolowski picked up several chinook salmon from Lake Bullen Merri.
Down Portland way, Bob McPherson reports that offshore anglers are still catching tuna, mostly juveniles, but Paul Skinner, Steve Nicolazzo and Ed Sommer were among those to take bigger fish with one of 111kg (gilled and gutted), that they caught in 80 metres of water.
Geoff, articles I’ve read on estuary fishing, variously refer to the gathering of “clickers” or “nippers” for bait. I gather these are some kind of shrimp; but do these names refer to the same creature or, are these separate species?
Ollie, clickers are pistol shrimp, so called because they have a large, specialised claw that produces a sonic shockwave as it’s snapped shut, stunning crabs and other creatures on which they prey.
The local variety of pistol shrimp is about 3cm in length, greenish in colour, and sometimes found in small reservoirs of water under oyster shells and the like at low tide.
Varieties elsewhere may be larger and more colourful. However, pistol shrimp are rarely used for bait.
On the other hand, nippers, or pink nippers — another crustacean — are highly regarded for bait and known locally as Bass yabbies.
They live in sand or mud burrows within the intertidal zone but are often incorrectly referred to as clickers by would-be fishing gurus.
Using a bait pump and a sieve you can collect them at low tide.