I often wonder if lure fishermen make lousy lovers.
After all , the very act of lure fishing is a mechanical one requiring repetitive hitching, pitching and twitching followed by winding, grinding and hopefully, finding. It all sounds like a factory process to me - very repetitive, with little need for tactile finesse and delicacy.
Successful bait fishing, on the other hand, is about using one senses - feel, touch, interpreting subtle hints.Indeed tactile sensation is what successful bait fishing is all about - ergo, good bait fishermen must be good lovers, by definition.
Yes - the skillful use of the sense of touch is everything to successful lovers - er I mean, successful bait fishermen.
Indeed, feeling the subtle hint of a nibbling fish on a fishing line resting in one’s fingers is absolutely the second best sensation that I know. (If you don’t know what the best sensation is, ask your daddy, Sonny. He will explain it to you. )
So it can be damn hard to be a successful bait fisherman if one cannot devote one’s entire tactile awareness to the job in hand. (Still talking about fishing here!)
For instance, you would not catch many fish if you had to hold an umbrella in one hand whilst trying to sense a fish on your line with the other hand and react accordingly when you do feel the hint of a fish. Often a hint is all you will get, of course.
That is why my catch from Mud Island today is so meagre.See the picture below.
But let me start at the beginning ...
I am often amused, bemused and confused by retail snobs. You know who I mean. We get them on this site all the time. So many people will turn up their noses at BCF, usually stating their preferences to support the local guy. ( I often wonder if they also do the same with grocery shopping, petrol shopping, car shopping and indeed any other shopping that they might do.
In my other hobby of woodwork, the same phenomenon happens. In that case the bad guy is not nasty old BCF but rather, it is nasty old Bunnings. “Pooh! Pooh!”, to Bunnings is what many people say.
Not me, I love Bunnings. I shop there all the time. I am old enough to remember just how pathetic most "local guy” hardware stores used to be. Most of those guys were in the hardware business as a lifestyle choice not as a customer driven business choice. Bunnings has revolutionised hardware shopping for the average punter in this country.
One of their best products is their umbrella.
If you can get your hands on a $10 Bunnings umbrella and don’t mind being a walking billboard when you use it, then you will have bought one of the best automatic umbrellas around. It is a beauty!
So, there I was, at around 3 am this morning, wondering if I would go fishing at Mud Island today because the BOM wind measurements on the bay were not quite the 5 - 10 knots that the Bureau had been forecasting. Indeed, it was gusting at about 15 knots. Worse than that, the pattern seemed to be a bit unstable.
Still, my boat was in my driveway, all ready to go, full of fuel, bait, ice, gear etc. I was ready to go, after having missed out on some of the better days to go last week because I needed to attend to some household maintenance.
But, the weather was not looking all that wonderful, this morning.
“Ah well”, I thought to myself, “maybe, I shall just take the boat to ramp and reassess the situation there.”
On arriving at the ramp at Manly boat harbour, I was still unsure.
There was a little bit of precipitation but worse than that, the masts on the yachts in the harbour were all jangling and the trees were swaying more than I would like. Indeed there was more wind up there than I felt confident about.
"What the heck! If I take it easy, it will all be OK."
And so it was.
Except for the rain.
I had just motored out of the boat harbour and down came the rain. Not heavy at first but just enough to not be able to see through my windscreen unless I zippered back the canopy and stood in the rain at the helm.
And so I did.
And so I was soaked from the time that I left Manly boat harbour to when I eventually arrived home to a hot shower a few hours later.
However, I did have one bright idea.
Just as I was leaving home, I thought to throw in my $10 Bunnings umbrella that I keep beside the front door.
I used it all morning.
My boat has a canopy but after 8 years, it has now perished and leaks like a sieve.
In any case, I prefer to fish from the back of the boat sitting on my big esky and facing forward, rather than from under the canopy.
And so I did today - holding my Bunnings umbrella in one hand and baiting, casting and sensing the bites and reacting accordingly with the other hand. Not real successful!
So I tried clipping the umbrella to my bait board behind me. That lasted about two minutes until my Bunnings umbrella was blown off the back of the boat and floated away upside down. "Whoops! There's a wave that has filled my Bunnings umbrella with water. It is still floating. I don’t want to lose that umbrella. It is the only one that I have" - well out on the boat at that critical time, anyway.
Up in come the lines, up comes the anchor, engine started and off to rescue the Bunnings umbrella.
"Got it! Now back to anchor up at my spot and continue on."
"Bugger! More rain!"
As shown below, the final take-home catch was just two grassies and a tuskie, all caught on prawns on three ganged 4/0 hooks (Well they are bloody big prawns!)
Apart from stacks of undersized squire, i also caught a trevally which I cut up for bait. All that I caught from the trevally fillets was a sleepy old wobbiegong so at that stage, I came home.
"Bugger! Not more rain?!"
Even though I was drenched from the time that I got there to the time that I arrived back at the boat ramp, the conditions were warm and the winds mostly behaved themselves. Indeed, very nice conditions at times, except for the rain.
I was the only boat to be seen anywhere between Manly and Mud Island until I was leaving when I saw a runabout inside the lagoon/creek thingy at the SW corner of Mud. By that stage the tide was really running out so I hoped that the skipper knew what he was doing in there. I wonder why someone would take the risk to take a boat in there?
I did, however, have the company of a very attentive dolphin for a couple of hours after the turn of the tide. Indeed, overall, it was a delightful outing. I just did not need all of the rain.
On the upside though, there were no mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes would stop those lure fishermen being good lovers as well, I suppose.
Click for full size - Uploaded with plasq's Skitch
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Originally Posted by snodger 08
