Tilapia on plastics

[Jeremy87]

Got home early this afternoon and figured i'd go for a bike ride down to the local fishing hole. Grab the bike out both tyres flat. Pump up tyres oil the chain etc off i go. half way down go to change gears, gears all seized up, oh well its mostly downhill anyway. Get down there bl@4dy hell fish all over the place. Ride back up the hill to get my fishing gear now i'm wishing the gears were working, get my breath back and grab my stuff and i'm off.

Must have been the most frustrating soft plastics session ever. The fish were schooled up so tightly that i was bumping the lure over ther backs. I swaped over to a lighter jig head and obout five minutes later and i feel a big heavy weight come onto the line, i'm on and it had some size. A short fight later and i have a 40+cm tilapia on the bank. I grab my trace and scramble around for a while trying to get it up the steep bank and snap. Oh well tie another jig head on and i'm at it again. Ten minutes later i hook up onto a smaller but much more enegetic fish which ran me into a snag and cut me off.

Persistance finally payed off and i landed a fish around the 30-35cm mark, this time i used a small scoop net to lift it up the bank. this one was soon followed by another slightly smaller fish. All the action had started to spook the fish and didn't land another fish for nearly 30 minutes but this one was the biggest of the day measuring 44cm.

All the fish were destroyed

[mattooty]

hahahaha, nice fish. Where abouts was it? like region? i didnt know there was tilapia in aust.
Matt

[reefraider_II]

nice read jeremy where were you fishing?-marty

[bluewaterbandit]

well done jeremy thats FISHIN dont ya luv iy cheers

[Jeremy87]

Freshwater section of tinny creek, yeh matt they are a big problem. Good fighters though, the two smaller ones stripped a fair bit of line off (using 6lb). Trick is to get their head out of the water and then they get too confused to run you into a snag.

[Steven78]

I never knew fishing could help the Environment

Good on YA

[szopen]

From where I live they are considered a reasonable fish, so we actually go fishing for them. If the water is clean they are a good eating fish (this is one of the main farmed fish worldwide).

Couple remarks.

Once they reach 10+ cm they tend to be rather wegetarian fish, only occasionaly eating other animals so they are much easier to catch with dough baits. I found that only in autumn they go for prawns (bigger ones) in summer dough is a much better bait.

It is a schooling fish and especially in spring they form large schools and stay close to surface but they do not really feed much at this time.

Getting one on SP is a good achievement and a 44cm model would be a 1.5kg and that is about as big as they get.

They are good fighters and I had them break off 6lb line a lot of times.
They are also cunningly spiky fish so I would not recomend using bare hands to handle them.

[Jeremy87]

SZOPEN
Haven't seen em much bigger in person but there have been several posts over the years on this site with much larger specimans. Apart from that their habits seem pretty similar over here. I think that the large springtime schools are breeders as they tend to be joined by smaller fish by the end of summer/autumn. Several of the larger fish have vivid red fins and these in particular will not eat anything you put in front of them. I believe that my strike rate would have been greatly improved if i had no lead at all with the plastics but it was required to bring the fish within casting distance. The water i pulled them from is pretty murky so i don't like the odds of them being good eating.

[szopen]

By clean I've meant not pulluted.

I have visited some tilapia farms where water is very murky but clean and the fish vere very good. A very good inication of water quality is presence of crustaceans (shrimps, crab...) their tolerance for water polution is very very low,

This is one hardy fish able to survive and reproduce in places where not too many others can.

The springtime schools are mostly breeding schools but also just schools of them hanging around the surface, frequently with their backs sticking out of the water and not feeding. In the lakes here during spring you can see thousands of them hanging just below the surface. They do not feed much below water at +15C.


This is not an agressive predatory fish so them taking SP's is rather rare and really not the way to go.

I have seen some of the reports with fish over 2kg what can I say

In here in China they have a huge choice of ready dough baits for them. Funny thing is a bait working well in one lake can be useless in another.
I am still trying to figure them out.

[Sandman]

Tilapia are extremly tuff fish, as a child i use to catch bigger fish than that in PNG. They stocked the town water dams with them to reduce the mozzie population. I would catch these fish walk home more than 2km with them in my hands put them in my fish tank and they would survive.
I use to eat my fare share of them aswell not bad eating at that size. Boy these things can breed being mouth brooders i introdueced a few mothers ( males)in my tank and soon had a large population .
I soon killed the lot and moved onto a true aquarium fish native to the country.
Unfourtunatly talapia and Gourami are now all over the waterways in PNG killing off some nice natives including the black bass .
Keep up your efforts in catching these and if your not going to eat them dig them into the garden for fertaliser .

Cheers Mick

[simon_vaughan]

Jeremy good fish, did you get them on gulps??? Probably none left at Campmart, haha!!!

[Gigantor]

Attached is a pic of my good lady with one of a number Tilapia caught at Lake Wivenhoe (near Brisbane)on 2 inch pink Squidgies. Yes pink squidgies! You can see it hanging from the corner of the mouth.

Not sure what the weight was of this one. But they fought like a train. Particularly on 3kg mono.

This one and others were caught late one afternoon from the bank. It was a memorable session on SP's for my lady, but not for me. As I seemed to have the catfish lure on that day. She caught about 5 Tilapia in about 45 minutes to my 2 catfish. Guess who did the washing-up that night?

Cheers,

Gigantor

[Jeremy87]

The gulps are all to big. Ive been using little 1 inch berkley grubs which seems to be the only plastics they'll take. Problem is i've only got 5 left and there are none left at work.
Went back again this arvo for another quick fish. Dropped 2 and landed 3, biggest went about 35 and weighed 1.2 kg's, this size seems to go the hardest as anything larger is to fat and lazy. Used a fish attractant today on my lures which seemed to be a big help. One fish was so energetic the it swam about 10 metres upstream taking line and jumped about 2 feet into the air and spat the hook.
Will post some more piccies later tonight.

[szopen]

Jeremy,

I know that SP's are fun but try some dough (bread + minced shrimp + red coloring) under a tiny float, a bit of bread based burley and it might make a big difference.

[Jeremy87]

most of these fish range from about 30-40cm