HenryR

lol, I am !

I yakked out to North Head on Friday just gone Since I first heard about them last year, I've really wanted to see the salmon schools in action out there and, better still, to find out how practical it is to chase them from a kayak. It's a big stretch of water for a fat little fishing kayak and I know from stalking salmon schools in much more tranquil and confined places that, when they really want to move, there is no way I can keep up with them. Happily, I'm here to report it worked well enough. For the first forty minutes or so - I was there pre-dawn, ready to pounce - I did some excessive huffing and puffing, arms aching as I tried to sprint across hundreds of metres of empty water to gulls and froth. Too many times, I'd arrive at the edge of school, if I even got that close, and while I pulled my rod from the holder the fish would disappear or move off in another direction. I was in fact in the act of re-designating the day's target species - snipping off a lure and tying on a hook and sinker - when the salmon came to me. First cast for the day actually in to the heart of school resulted in an instant hook up. Nice. The schools got bigger and seemed to hang at the surface longer as the sky lightened. For a little while, I was able to hang in pretty much the same place and throw casts when the fish came near. I managed two fish in about an hour and a half, which is not many from thousands but, there were some long quiet spells and punting around in a kayak consumes a surprising amount of time. I picked up a few trevally in between the salmon. They took sps cast out and not retrieved - just drifted down. By 7:am the quiet spells became too long and I nicked of to try other things. Good fun for a few hours and it's an excellent change to be surrounded by way, way too many fish! Yay for weekdays off!!! 6:30am .. the rest of Sydney in the background, getting ready for work Possibly the 2 fish should have been three but, having raced from Old Mans Hat to here (the drop off where everyone camps out waiting for kings) I was so puffed (and perhaps overexcited?) that I managed to wrap the braid around a guide and snapped it first cast. I retied a leader in time and about three casts and no fish later did the same thing .. oh well, I would never have stopped to take the photo otherwise. one for dinner

Don't forget there are manufacturers who replace broken rod parts for for a fraction of the rod cost. Get a nice rod but don't have to lose your money or buy the whole thing again if something goes wrong is a great system. If you have time: there's not just sales, there's some great buys to be had 2nd hand. Of course, 8 miles down a gorge, be sure you're carrying a spare tip guide or two to stick on the end of what's left of your rod... something I learned the hard way It wasn't an 8 mile walk but was 3 1/2 hours drive from home, mid way through the first day of a long weekend.

I suspect the biggest, though not only, obstacles are on the fisho-side of the equation. It's not just that it's hard to imagine anything hitting a moving target without the aid of sight. If you're sight dependent, like most of us, lots of targeted casting at night is actually a bit hard to do. Near any sort of structure when it's properly dark judging casts is a nightmare. Even knowing when a lightly weighted sp has hit the bottom can be tricky without the benefit of seeing the line to go slack. Weird and a slightly new skill set. Like BN says, it can work. The most striking example of it I've ever been part of was catching bass on a no moon night in very narrow gorge. It was so dark I couldn't see my hand. The bass were 10m down where things must have been completely pitch black, but still taking vibes. A little bit amazing

BN, Coastie, Regan, Jacob, thanks muchly for the generous comments Jacob, you bet Pittwater is on the list of places to visit this 'season'! I've been on a few failed attempts at getting fish out of there but they've all been visits at times when other places weren't the go either. Sometimes you gotta rip yourself away from known bets to properly learn new stuff. It does sound like, when Pittwater's good it is excellent. Will let you know when we make it, lol, that far north!! Actually lots of places to try this summer ... we - krause, myself and a few other associated yakkers - learned a few new tricks in the slow last half of last summer and autumn. Still have a lot to learn but I'm quietly confident (or optimistic) that this season we can consolidate a bit and find at least a few good fish for everybody. coastie, do you get to fish the Haven much??

Great article JonD, Thanks for posting. I'll admit to using fluorocarbon because ..... no good reason .... I just understood it to be the done thing. You can't question everything in the world! Amusingly, while reading the article, it occurred to me I've never even thought to put two bits of line under water and compare their visibility. Not definitive but a pretty simple test! Even if it's right, myths busted and all, it sounds fluoro is an optimal choice for leaders intended to fend of abrasion. At least where the leader has a higher breaking strain than the main line because the fluoro would be (I'm assuming a bit here) unlikely to hit 'deformation point'. After a bit of soaking it seems that's even more the case because, then, nylon has got even softer. Fluoro as a mainline tho ... hmmm? Afterthought: anyone know if the deformation point is significantly below actual breakage for fluoro?

i was gonna post this in Fishing Reports but now I see it's already got a place. Even though Rod had plans to hit the Hacking and I was weighing up the merits of paddling to some quiet corner of the Hawkesbury to sit in the sun and chase luderick, it was krause who called the shots in the end. Krause dictated an early start at Port Kembla for all three of us. It was the slimmest of plans. We'd fetch some livies, troll them around in the first hour or two of light, not expecting much to happen, just in case we got lucky. Then we'd retreat to the back of the bay, where the weekend's big swells couldn't get us, and toss plastics for flathead. And that's almost exactly what happened. Only pike and mini barracuda wanted to eat yakkas and one by one we all drifted to the back of the bay. There, sadly not much was happening either. Krause had a few bumps but no hook up and Rod likewise, bites but no fish. I couldn't even get a bump from a fish so, half heatedly, I paddled back to the breakwall. A lucky decision that scored the only fish of the day. It was a pretty chaotic fight because I had line out to a snagged lure when the livie rod took off. The king managed to circle through the lot (of course). Two crossed lines, one tied to the bottom the other to fish charging off in to the distance, and two unsecured rods in a kayak. I decided to sacrifice a lure and cut the braid on the snagged line figuring that'd be the end of it. Braid is like spider web at times! More than once during the fight I looked down at my reel to discover the stray braid had somehow reappeared and was again wrapping itself around my reel again. It took lots of nervous line snipping, some luck, and a fair bit of the frantic back paddling that comes with hooking kings from a kayak near structure to finally get a fish in the net. New kingie pb for me, 80cm, and few nice hours in some almost summery sun. We finished off the morning with a quick walk out to Hill 60 and watched small mountains of water roll between the point and the island - big seas might limit the fishing options but they are awesome. little boat meets BIG boat fish meets little boat

Awesome, a little bit of pent up spleen vented (in a controlled manner) and almost guaranteed to be heard. thank you so much for posting that !

It's a bit banal, no?

dislike

same, same - nearly a month of doughnuts. Luderick though .... don't forget they eat weed flys ......

hey Salty trout, I can't speak for the fishing but I've paddled .. can't exactly recall the distance, probably 6 or 7kms of the Shoalhaven as it runs toward and past Braidwood. This was year's ago and after a lot of rain. We were chasing rapids not fish and I wasn't fishing much at the time but even so it struck me as a very nice looking stretch of water for fishing. We did see fish, couldn't tell what but I would be money they were carp - big surface swirls left in the muddy water from fish fleeing when they spotted us. Anyway, there's some very pretty water there and it's easy big enough and interesting enough, and when we went, winter, cold enough to house trout.

a qualifier to my almost rant above because I think it makes me sound even more clueless than I am and confuses the point. I'm not suggesting that a Caldia and a Certate are the same reel. They are not. If I pay close attention to my reels, I can tell the difference. The point I was trying to make is that if you're a punter like me - keen and fish very regularly but still a punter. Then, my impression is, in practice there's very little if anything at all to separate the two reels. And the point, I think to be taken from that is not that reel makers are having a lend of at the pricier end of the market. The point is, that in making the step up from reels in the will-suffice price bracket to mid-range reels with 'nice' features, if you like your fishing and fish regularly, you actually gain some very significant ground for extra money spent.

Not one reply to my question but since this thread has so far had over 7,700 reads, I assume there is interest out there. So, for the inquisitive and the reckless and maybe even for the competent having a 1st look here's some pics and impressions from my dive in the Daiwa's magseal no-go zone. I might be mistaken but, I did not seem complicated. That's a good thing. I reckon the first thing to say is that magseal is not some magic substance that coats all the moving parts of the reel's interior. That is such an any easy impression to get from Daiwa promotionals that, not only did I have it but, the staff in my favourite tackle store, one of whom has watched Daiwa techs working on magseal reels also had that impression. The reels guts are lubricated with good old oil and grease. There's a couple of very helpful threads, with some much more expert commentary than I can offer, over at Alan Tani. They are recommended readying. From those and from what I saw, magseal happens only in two places in older Certates and Caldias. #1. At the 'magnet assembly' on the outer end of the roller clutch housing. #2. In the line roller bearing - I haven't looked in there yet The magseal oil is more a sealant than a lubricant. It's some type of ferro fluid. Daiwa won't say exactly what. If you don't already know, ferro fluid is oil (the word fluid would suggest it doesn't have to be oil?) with little bits if metal suspended in it. The little bits of metal mean the liquid is attracted to magnets. A neat trick. Ferro fluid wasn't hard to get. I got mine from a speaker repair place in Qld. It doesn't cost much. There's a few people over at Alan Tani who say they've been using this particular fluid for a while and that it's worked fine. That's the recommendation I went on. This is the ferro fluid I ended up getting. It comes in a little plastic sachet. Unless you own a lot of reels there's more fluid in the sachet than you're likely to use. The flat plate is the 'magnet assembly', the main seal happens between it and the collar pictured (Daiwa call call the collar a spacer) a close up of the magnet bit. You can stick pins, paperclips, etc... to it Woohoo! No clips or screws required. The magnet bit just hangs off the spacer/collar bit. There's a gap between the magnet and spacer/collar which, if left unfilled, would let water and salt and everything in. This is the magnetic plate in place on the reel, gap still unfilled, with the 'main shaft', the bit the spool rides on, sticking out. And this is it. Magseal. The same scene as above but with the gap filled with ferro fluid. If you read up online you might get the impression that putting the fluid in place can be tricky. It's not. You just cut a little bit off the top of the ferro fluid sachet and squeeze a little fluid into the gap until it seems full. As mentioned, the sachet comes with more than enough ferro fluid to have a few goes on a few reels. Get anything wrong and you can wipe the ferro flud off, fix what you got wrong and reassemble with no fear of running out of fluid. I've been inside two reels and in the process had to do an extra disassemble-reassemble because I managed to put the collar/spacer in upside down, and also because I let the stopper lever slip off it's notch while reassembling, In addition to that I did a few put it together pull it apart explores. Even after all that there's still tons of fluid in the sachet I bought. To give a little more context. A little deeper in the reel here, under the roller clutch housing. These pics are a Certate not Caldia but they very much the same at this point. Plate and spacer/collar, roller clutch housing (it's part of the outside of the reel), and, at the bottom with some green plastic showing, the roller clutch which sits around the shaft and inside the housing. Youtube clip of maseal fluid in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYgakH4LZ30 And here, a ripper teardown clip for 2011 Caldia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWphPQjNnRM ------ Anyone wanting to know more: do do some online searching, there's better commentary on this topic out there than I can offer and, you're also welcome to pm me, I'm more than happy to chat about what it was like.

there's special extra slippery grease for drag washers. might vary depending on what washers are in whatever reels you have. any ok tackle store ought to be able to steer you in the right direction but, maybe before you head down, have a look on the appropriate manufacturer website(s) and see what the people who made your reel think you should do to it !