Reply With Quotewhenever you see a seasnake have a good sound around . there is a reason that he is in the area
Stuie
has anyone got any tips or localknowlage they can share which would be a help to chaceing large mouth nannigi in the cairns portdouglas area?? any tips would be apreciated cheers.
whenever you see a seasnake have a good sound around . there is a reason that he is in the area
Stuie
IF IT CAN'T EAT A WHOLE PILLY I DON'T WANT IT
a seasnake??? I see seasnakes everwhere i fish, about 10% of spots hold nannies!
Ok Large Mouth nannys.
They are my favorite fish to chase especially at night but also you can find them in the day in what I would call random locations.
The places I catch them in the day are a mixture of small bommies that hold them and rubbly corally patches with less defined features.
I dont know why but I have over the years found a few spots as described above where I can almost always catch a few to a dozen good ones ona daytime trip. As you would appreciate they are very treasured marks.!
As far as night time goes, I usally head to 45 - 55 metre water and fish rubbly patches with quite small structure. Be prepared to fish this sort of country all thru the night, as when they come on the bite you want to be on deck or at least having a rod or two set with light drag and ratchet on to arouse you from the comfort of your cabin bunks! If you see any bait at all on this rubblle its a good sign but I have caught heaps where no bait was showing initially.
Im sure a lot of fishos miss them by being asleep, as weoften start catching them after midnight and sometimes from the faintest start of daybreak until the sun actually rises and then they can stop in an instant at this point. Often filled a rubbish bin or two with fish at that time of day, not just large mouth. I dont chase small mouth at all as they are not even on the page with LM when it comes to taste.
The art of catching them is another story! especially when they are mouthing it and not swallowing and running.
Cheers
John
Step one, Fix this bloody wind.
Step two, refer to step one.
Step three, re-read what John wrote.
Step four, go fishing.
Cheers Ron
Make something Idiot proof and they make better Idiots
Can't help with your local area, but can help with some general advice to get you looking in the right places.
First up generally avoid anything shallower then 45-50m for your LM.
Start by looking at you GPS and or paper charts and look at the contour lines, many people will tell you this is bullcrap, but starting from scratch it is the best thing you can do without doubt. Follow the contour lines especially in places where there is heavy curvature, that is when the line looks as though it will loop around on it self or do a figure 8 or something, a sudden change in direction will mean there is something hard on the bottom forcing the sand etc to move around it, like rock, rubble, soft coral, fern etc, something that is holding the bottom and stoppong the current from eroding it. sharp turns etc will produce up-wellings and eddies in the current where food sources will congregate and where there food there's predators. best way to work these lines is by trolling, you get a good look at the bottom at a slower speed while also having every chance at a fish. mark a few spots around the same area and make another trip to fish the bottom and note down what you catch and what tides etc. Each spot may fish different on different tides even if they are only a few hundreded metres away from one another, so don't dismiss a spot after fishing it once, give it a couple of goes before crossing it off, you don't have to fish long, just 1/2 hour at each stage of the tide to suss it out ie fish say the hour of slack water at high tide, slack water at low tide and half hour in the middle of both the rising and falling tide. This will pretty much cover your bases for the sake of 3 hours fishing which you can spread over several trips if you like. Do this for every spot you find.
Once you have found a couple of spots along the contours each trip you make out there sound around away from them, throw a couple of lures out and sound between spots, taking a slightly different route each time. Over time you will find new spots that might fish better (contour lines can be pretty heavily fished becasue that's how most people start out) away from the lines, and these will often fish better becasue fewer peopl will know them...everyone starts with the contour lines.
It's a slow process, but each trip you would find about 1/2 doz new places to try and soon enough you will have more spots and more nannies and reds than you will know what to do with, which is good, because that means you can rotate them. Be careful not to put too much pressure on the schools though, if you clean them out on a couple of outings then they won't come back, its the older fish that show the younger fish where to go and if you take out all the older fish before the next recruitment comes along, well, not a lot of point in fishing that spot for a few years.
So Scott what is the deepest you fish ? I know fishos who chase them in 70 metres as well
John
Deepest I have fished is 70m, and this has brought my biggest to date of both emperor and LM. Would like to fish deeper, just to see if the trend continues.
i have caught LM shallower than 45m, but have found more often than not that the shallower water tends to bring about the SM nannies. Like I said I avoid shallower than 45m for this reason and tend to fish more around the 60m mark.
I'm not claiming to be any sort of expert but with asking questions and learning while on the water, when starting out, that is the best advice I can give without handing out marks.
Oh and when using your sounder, when looking for new country, I tend to set the upper and lowere limits so I am looking at the bottom 5-10m of water. reds will hug the bottom, so looking at the bottom you see more of everything, bait, structure and target species.
Something else I neglected to mention, is a ot of good red spots will be soft as gravelly bottom where it is very difficult to hold bottom. These area are often colonised by soft fern corals. The major part of a red's diet is worms believe it or not, thats why they have the big juby lips to sift though the soft gravel bottom. LM will normally hang just above them after the bait that the bottom disruption by the reds both attracts and disperses food sources. Often in one particular spot, it is quite common to hook up on a red on the bottom hook, only to wind up a couple of metres and get hooked up on a LM on the top hook....which always makes for a great fight and even better reward.
John and Scott, thanks for such informative posts. i know that guys like yourselves that produce consistent results on lmn's only do so because they have invested years getting it right, so thanks for sharing your knowledge.
John, in regard to your post i am curious as to when you are fishing your ground "all through the night" are you moving around alot if they are not biting or do you spend the time to anchor up correctly on ground that you are confident is holding the fish and just wait for them to come on the bite?
i know in the past i have found ground and confident that we are marking lmn but unable to get them to bite, so i fish it for a half an hour and then move on looking for more ground to fish. so, i have spent nights doing this then eventually found more ground and got them biting but this can be hours later and i always ask myself the question "would they be biting at the last spot now if we had of just stayed there?".
Scott, what are your tips in regard to anchoring in the depths you are fishing?
This is another question i continually ask myself as i have found ground and drifted it a few times and picked up fish immediately; then decided to anchor but in the depths you are talking it usually takes me a few times to get it right so i might waste half an hour getting positioned correctly and by the time we get a line back in the water they are not biting any more!
I have been chasing them for a few years now and still have mixed results, it is certainly the most challenging sort of fishing i have done so once again thanks for sharing your knowledge
in deep water getting them to bite might be just the currents slowing down or speeding up, just depends on the current that normally flows and what the tide is doing. In one of my spots, we really only get good results when the outgoing tide is running at its peak so about the middle 2 hrs of the tide will fish well, otherwise there's just too much current there. This spot is between 2 reefs and is a pretty constant southerly current, on an outgoing tide the tide pushes agianst the current and slows it down and lets the bait fish out from behind their hidey holes and makes for easier pickings for the reds and LM. This spot is particularly tricky to anchor on and the grounds is very soft and rubbly. My advice when anchoring is to come up on your mark, and get the boat stationary and watch the snail trail on your plotter to get a line of drift. Motor back up the line of drift and go anywhere from 3-5times the depth past the mark (50m you want to go from 150-250m past your mark), this gives the anchor anough time to hit bottom and leaves anough room so it can drag a bit before hooking up. the more chain the better and to will get the anchor to the bottom quicker and hook up faster. really soft patches of rubble sometimes needs and additional anchor in front of the plough to hold bottom (rope, chain to plough, then more chain from front of plough to a sand anchor).
What maeks it difficult is when the wind might drop off through the night so any influence it had over how you hung at anchor would dissappear along with it. I don't like to move around too much at night so will more often than not anchor up on a good patch, have a quick drop, catch a few,have a kip then wake and back into it. Its all about finding the best times that particular spot fishes best and taking notes...always carry a pencil and a writing pad with you to take notes, like what you caught where, new spots found and what type of bottom (hard, soft, reef etc) fish caught at new spots and what time of day, stage of the tide etc. Take down as much information as you can and be as specific as possible. This will help you in the long run and your kids when they get out on their own...you wil have already done the hard yards learning from scratch for them, they just add to the info and keep passing it down the line.
I think you are finding the right country but I would stay a bit longer generally. I would sometimes fish up to 10 marks a night, but usually get most of your fish on one or two of these, but I do get around a bit.Originally Posted by don-one
When they are not biting you would wonder if there are any left in the sea at all, it can be that dead.
My experience is that they will bite sometime thru the night, so I work on being on deck fishing or having rods set with light drag and ratchet on while having 40 winks. We have often had them come on while we are sleeping and this method gets you up and into them.
generally a gentle current works best I find, zero current usually means zero fish, and fast current makes it real hard to fish the bottom in those depths. If there is a run and you can still get to the bottom, and especially if you are feeling bites, keep feeding line out to them gently as you will catch good nannies like this. Like Scott I do drift at times when the breeze is light, with some success thru rubbly country.
As far as results go, we generally hope to catch at least 20 reds on a night tripwith 4 fishos. this is a combo of LM nannies, Red Emperor, and maybe a few Reef Jacks, although they are not a prize fish to me as their taste and texture drops away rapidly over 3 kg. As I said earlier I don't rate Small mouth at all in a catch, but we dont get many of them anyway. Some nights we get good red emperor so out of say 20 red fish there might be 5 red E. legal size up to 20 lb. sometimes more , but usually our best take is of LM. We have had bag outs in 2 hours as well, but thats rare (36 large mouth = 4 fishing) super fun especially when other fish are firing as well among them. Most crazy session recently was a satuday arvo last August in 30 metres . Every picture tells a story. Hoped Ive helped.
We all look like we are crazy in this pick but they were heavy!!
John, my old mate Garry Smith (second from the right) doesn't need to be lifting two heavy fish to look a little crazy!
Yeah !! I will remind him for you. Im on the right in the red t shirt looking like Im on drugs! Dont know why but we were hyped or somthing. Its certainly not a good representation of me and even less of Garry.
Do you know him from Cairns?
Garry became my next door nieghbour in the early 90s here in Nothern beaches of Cairns. Had some great fishing moments in his boat as well
Cheers
I spent five years working for Fishing Monthly so that's how I got to meet Garry. We fishing together a couple of times when I was visiting NQ, smashed some nice jacks in the South Johnstone on the good old prawnstars many years ago. His wife Antoinette cooks a mean meal!
Cheers
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