The Great De-Bait

NSW STH COAST

Steve Starling www.fishotopia.com

Even the very best lure or fly can’t always hope to match the ‘real thing’, especially when it comes truth. By far the majority of Australia’s four million-plus fishers choose to use bait a lot of the time. There’s a good reason for that, too: it works!

Don’t get me wrong.

I love lure and fly fishing. But I also happily return fishers – started our angling careers using “smelly old bait”. To be honest, I actually feel a little sorry for those who didn’t, and instead dived straight into the deep end with artificial offerings. In some ways, I reckon that means they missed out on to fooling fickle fish… There’s a lot to be said for good ol’ bait!

Anyone reading fishing magazines or watching TV shows on the subject these days could easily be forgiven to my bait fishing roots on a very regular basis, and I don’t regard doing so as a step down the fishing status ladder.

Let’s face it, a lot of us –even the keenest lure or fly an important chunk of the overall learning process.

Fishing with baits –especially natural baits that we gather, catch or collect ourselves – teaches us so much about the fish we hunt, the environments they live in, and the things they prefer to eat. That grass roots knowledge is absolutely invaluable, and helps set us up for a long and successful to say that taking these steps can double, triple or even quadruple your catch rate, not to mention producing a much better class of fish, in terms of both size and on a 1/0 Suicide hook suspended about 1.5m under a small float. My results were nothing short of spectacular. You can watch my video of that session by scanning the QR code with this column, or going to my ‘Starlo Gets Reel’ YouTube channel and searching for a clip called ‘Live Prawns and Popping Corks’. It’s worth a look. I wasn’t overly surprised at how deadly those live offerings were. What did surprise me, however, was just how inferior dead prawns were by comparison – even very fresh ones that had died in my aerated bucket of water only an hour earlier. It was chalk and cheese –reinforcing once again just what a difference it can make to secure the liveliest possible offerings and keep them alive. Those clicking tails and kicking legs made all the difference. Some experienced for thinking that most of us now fish almost exclusively with lures. In reality, nothing could be further from the

QR CODE fishing life – whether we choose to keep using natural bait or not.

Of course, there’s bait and bait. Freezer-burnt prawns or dried out old pilchards from the local servo may catch their share of fish, but results are generally much better if you take the trouble to collect your own bait, keep it alive or as fresh as possible, and then use it as soon as you possibly can. I’d go so far as species desirability.

Scan this QR code or go to the “Starlo Gets Reel” channel on YouTube to watch Steve’s “Live Prawns & Popping Corks” how-to video.

Sure, you’ll catch plenty of small fish like this little tarwhine on bait, too. Using circle hooks or striking fast can help prevent deep-hooking.

A saying I often quote when discussing bait is the phrase ‘fresh is good, live is better’. It’s so true. Just recently I kept a few prawns alive after a late night session scoop netting a kilo or so of these tasty little crustaceans for the table.

Next morning, I rose before the sun and headed out onto my local estuary to present those lively, kicking prawns fishers who nowadays choose to use lures and flies exclusively seem to have a tendency to look down their noses at bait fishos, and often denigrate their activities as lesser forms of the art. Not me. I know that the very best bait anglers are at least as good at what they do as the most switched-on lure and fly casters… and those bait soakers can definitely teach the rest of us a thing or two!