Ken_Oath

<retailer removed> is worth checking out, they are specialists in Japanese fishing gear and are my go to store for rock fishing tackle. I do 90% of my fishing between December and may when the water is warmer and the seasonal pelagics are in town but you can definitely catch fish in Sydney year round. Focusing on pelagics, Aussie salmon and tailor are the most common over the cooler months. You can catch them fishing the usual rock ledges, in deep gutters on the beach and even up into the estuaries. Some kingfish also stick around and they tend to be the big ones, live baiting from the rocks is probably your best bet from shore but you can also book a charter and go jigging and live baiting at one of the offshore reefs. Your half right assuming tuna are summer fish. The tuna you can realistically catch from shore, bonito, Mac tuna and far less often longtail tuna are all summer fish. The proper offshore game fishing tuna, southern bluefin usually come around in winter. (I don't go game fishing but I've heard that around the second state of origin is when their up near Sydney)

I caught one a couple weeks ago up at Nelson bay. I didn't know what it was either but apparently it's a striped scat and the spines are venomous

Most of my fishing for pelagics has been from the boat trolling lures and using livies or bait. Recently I've been getting more into casting lures from the rocks and could use some pointers from more experienced fishos. I'm based in Sydney around botany bay so my target species are tailor, salmon, kingfish and bonito. My go-to setup is a saltist mq 4000 spooled with 300m PE2(41lb) braid on an 8ft 6-12kg td black rod and I also bring a heavier setup with either a Daiwa bg 5000(50lb line) or daiwa revros 6000(30lb line) on a 9ft6 PE2-5 saltist bw rod. I use about a rod length of flouro leader, 20-40lb for the light setup and 30-60lb on the heavy The lures I use are stickbaits and poppers between 100-160mm and 30-60g and also afew 20-40g metals. I've gone rock fishing, using only lures about 5 times now and I haven't caught a single fish. Is there something I'm doing wrong/should change or do I just have to keep pumping out casts?

I just saw a 6000 saragosa for 20% off

I wouldn't recommend it if you don't have experience rock fishing or want to catch fish consistently but my favourite fishing is throwing 14-50g lures from the rocks on a 20lb setup. You don't necessarily catch more legal fish but the target species, Tailor, bonito, kingfish and salmon are fun to catch, putting up a decent fight even when undersized. It's far from the best way to catch a feed but if your after bigger fish, a small undersized kingy is bigger than any bream

If you want to get your average fish size up it would help to use lures and/or live bait. Live nippers and worms are good for bream, whiting and silver trevally and can either be collected from the beach or bought from some tackle stores. For flathead live poddy mullet are probably the best bait, to get them you can either use a trap(home made or from a tackle store) or you can catch them using a size 12 long shank hook, a small float and white bread for bait and burley. For lures it's worth having a cranka crab for bream and afew soft plastics for flathead. The best times to fish in general are low light periods around sunrise and sunset until you get a feel for the area and how the fish behave. For example my in my local system I know that bream will come up onto the sand flats as the tide is rising and can be caught in less than a metre of water while flathead prefer to sit in the deeper dropoffs as the tide is going out. for this type of fishing you shouldn't go too heavy, I use 6lb braided line and 3-14lb leaders sometimes even dropping down to 3lb flouro mainline for bream on the sand flats. I've got a 28ft boat but I still do almost all my light estuary fishing land based and use the boat more for trolling lures and fishing reefs or headlands. So it definitely isn't essential but fishing from a small boat with an electric trolling motors or a kayak does give you more options.

You could go as small as a 10000, 10k reels should hold 300m of pe5 and the saltiga 12 braid in pe5 has a breaking strain of 88lbs. The decent 10k reels all have 15kg+ of drag and only weigh around 600 grams I'd only move up to the 18k if you really need 300m of pe8, 120lb line and 20kg+ of drag for chasing monster GT

I'm trying to minimalise my tackle collection with the end goal of having only a light, medium and heavy lure combo and a live baiting setup. Currently I'm looking to replace 2 Daiwa Revros 1-4kg combos with 2500 and 2000 reels, these were bought for $120 each on sale at a shop and I've used them for around 2 years mostly lure fishing bream and flathead. The 2500 was the first lure fishing setup I ever owned and seemed perfect compared to the mono line and fibreglass rods I was used to however last October I bought myself what I would consider a fancy combo (Daiwa saltist mq 4k, daiwa td black slugger 6-12kg, shimano ocea8 pe2 line) for around $800 and the cheepo $120 revros just doesn't do it for me anymore. I've decided to get rid of the 2 revros combos and get something abit nicer, I have my heart set on the Daiwa td black mq 2500s spooled with saltiga 12 pe0.6 but I could use some suggestions on what rod to get for around $2-300. I would like something around 7-7'6ft that can cast around 10g mostly for targeting bream and flathead.

Why overhead? Your limited to just live baiting and jigging with an overhead jigging reel, a solid spinning reel like the 18k Certate and Saragossa or 8500 slammer holds 300m of pe8, has 20-25kg of drag and can be put on a longer rod for throwing stickbaits and poppers. Also unless your specifically targetting 20kg+ kingies and GT with locked up drag around tight structure pe8 is overkill, pe8 saltiga 12 braid for example has a breaking strain of 118lb. In my opinion the pe5 is all you need, it breaks at 88lbs + you can fit 300m on a 10k reel which is alot lighter and more comfortable for long jigging sessions. I personally would only consider getting a pe8-10 setup for hotspots like three kings in New Zealand and the whitsundays where there is a real chance of hooking a 40kg kingie or GT. I'm more into topwater but I've read up abit on the master jiggers over in new Zealand. They reckon its 100% worth it to go out on a jigging specific charter to get a feel for the gear used and the mechanical jigging technique before you go out and spend a fortune on your own setup. Besides jigs and a combo you'll need: A decent sounder that you know how to use, the goal is to drop the jig in front of the fish's face so locating bait and structure is essential A gimbal, to make it easier wrestling a big kingy away from structure after you're arms stop working from hours of jigging A pr bobbin, the pr knot is supposed to be the go to jigging knot so it wouldn't hurt to learn it

What are some of your go to lures for chasing pelagics off the stones? I've been meaning to buy afew surecatch knight/spanyid raiders for awhile and I figure while I'm at at I may aswell buy another lure or two that I probably don't need so any recommendations would be great.

The combo I use for Bonnie's and other small pelagics off the rocks is a 8ft Daiwa TD black slugger 6-12kg, 15-60g cast weight and a Daiwa saltist mq 4000 spooled with 300m of shimano ocea 8 pe2 braid. 8ft might be considered abit short for rock fishing but I don't have any issues with casting distance or washing fish in and find 8ft to be the perfect length for working stickbaits and poppers comfortably. I honestly can't think of a better rod than the slugger for light spinning off the rocks. The action is light enough to have fun with smaller pelagics like bonito, salmon, tailor and rat kingies but it also has enough low end power for when you need to crank up the drag and put some hurt on a larger fish.

I was spewing I didn't bring my new 20lb lure setup, I bet that would have been a more interesting fight than winching it to the boat with the 24kg live bait setups, but now that I know the bonito are in town and hanging out close to the rocks I plan to target them from the shore on light gear for some proper sport fishing.

Over the holidays we drove the boat up to ettalong from Sydney and had to leave it at its mooring at the marina until yesterday due to mechanical issues making it unsafe to cross back to the harbour. Anyway we had a mechanic take a look at the boat, a mustang 2800 with a Volvo 5.0 v8 and it looks like exhaust flaps failed, hydrolocking the engine. The boat was still having issues starting but we couldn't extend our mooring as it was being filled the next day, after about 15 minutes we got the engine running and we're making our way out of the bay. The trip back to Sydney began with issues with my dad getting me to drive us out of Brisbane waters and broken bay and I, being too impatient and not knowing the waterway very well decided to take a shortcut away from the channel markers and straight onto a sandbar. I could see on the sounder that the water was 2.5m and slowly getting more shallow but the deeper water of the channel was only 20 meters away and thought I was in the clear, that's when I felt us hit sand and my dad runs up from below deck absolutely fuming that I didn't stay between the markers. At this point I'm thinking I've stranded us and to make matters worse I couldn't get reception to check what stage the tide was at. luckily the wind turned us around and with the props cutting through sand we made it back to deeper water. After we both calmed down my dad told me a story about him doing the exact same thing when he was younger with his brothers boat only he got really stuck and had to get in the water and push the boat free. Lesson learned, markers are there for a reason The ride back was pretty calm so we decided to troll some lures in close to the headlands, we didn't plan on doing any fishing so we just used a couple live baiting outfits and 2 lures we had lying around the boat, almost as soon as we let out the first line the drag starts going and I pick up the rod while my dad drives, after I tighten up the drag I notice a massive birdsnest in the reel and try fixing it quickly before landing the fish, my dad sees me struggling and takes over while I drive, as soon as I take the wheel I see we're heading straight for the rocks and are at the most 4 boatlengths away from the crashing waves, I quickly give it some throttle and stear us away and into a set of big waves which were taller than the boat which freaked me out but I got us into calmer water while my dad brought what turned out to be a bonito into the boat. We set the lures back and trolled until we passed longreef where we saw a paddleboarder riding over the massive breaking waves while maintaining perfect balance which was pretty impressive. After longreef we brought in our lines and floored it back to Sydney wanting to get back to the marina on cockatoo Island before it got dark. My family had covid over the holidays (were all hood now) so this was only our second session of the season with our first being me and my dad getting hyped up for some big kingies setting out with some really good sized yakkas and one giant slimey then giving up after after less than an hour when we both started feeling sick not knowing yet that we had covid. Anyway this is my first report I know there's not a whole lot of fishing but I still enjoyed it and it turned the boring job of bringing our boat back home into a day to remember.

Those oceans legacy specialist rods look really high quality and I bet they can catch some monster fish but the daiwa is Bright red and is called the Demon Blood and owning a bright red fishing rod called a Demon Blood sounds like something I really want to do

Yeah pe6 probably is overkill but I already have a 12kg lure casting combo spooled with pe2 and a spare spool I'm planning to fill with pe3 so I want something noticeably heavier. looking around at what rods are out there the 2021 Daiwa Demonblood 9ft 6 pe 3/5 with maybe a 10k size reel seems perfect as I can have 300m of pe5 and I can get another spool with 500m of pe3 if I ever want to try targeting tuna up the coast.