Calamari Time

Get prepared for delicious squid

Richard Sherriff

Over the past few years, squiding has gained in popularity amongst recreational anglers, fishing from boat, jetty or pontoon. It’s becoming popular as squid are challenging to catch, put up a good fight on light tackle and cooked correctly is delicious.

With concern that there are signs of Calamari depletion, closures during peak spawning season have been introduced for the full month of October each year along the north coastline and the Eastern coast fishery from the 15th October through till 14th November.

These closures are designed to give the calamari an opportunity to lay eggs during these periods. Moreover, recreational fishers have had bag limits cut from 15 per day to 10. There is a proposal that a further bag cut is planned, and if so it will be fiercely resisted by the recreational fishing fraternity, as the closure and prior reduced bag limits was accepted with little or no criticism.

In relation to gear, there is now available a range of purposely designed EGI rods that add to the experience and help increase catches. These rods are designed to improve distance when casting jigs and, due to their built for purpose design, afford gentle and at all times pressure to the catch without tearing out the barbs or breaking off the squid’s tentacles.

The popular sizes of jigs are 3.0, 3.5 & 4.0 with the latter preferred for deep water and where strong currents are running. Size 3.5 is the popular choice for most anglers, with the 3.0 popular when fishing in shallow water. Jigs are made in a huge range of colours, but always have a redhead in your tackle box plus the now popular lumo, green, yellow with orange body jig. Different colours seem to work well on different days, don’t be afraid to try other colours. A successful squid jig features a good sinking rate and a balanced attitude in the water. The key though is to always fish an incoming or outgoing tide as slack tides are usually unproductive.

Get your jig well down whilst retrieving using a series of rips and pauses, most times squid take to jig on the pause. When a squid is hooked ensure your fishing partners cast another jig well behind the incoming catch as often another one or two squids are following the already hooked one.

The productive areas for catching squid are locations where a weedy bottom is present, regardless of whether you are boat or land based. For pontoon and jetty anglers, there is often a tell-tale sign that squid are present in the area by the amount of squid ink on the structure deck, these are the places to try your luck.

A good starting location is the Clarence Point pontoon. Another popular spot is the sea side of the Pilot Station rock wall at Low Head which is often productive for Squid, in particular after they have laid eggs and started to move into the river. For boaties, inside the Tamar River Heads is a good spot or over the weeds beds off Kelso. For those anglers who want to venture outside there are good weed beds at Two Mile Reef and further east that are usually productive. Birdport is another great location to try for squid with some really good sized specimens in this area. On the eastern side of the state, Bicheno has some fantastic fishing at times as well.

We have a no ink in the boat policy as it’s shocking stuff to clean and permanently stains clothing and safety gear. Best before netting to let the squid eject a fair bit of ink, let it swim parallel with the boat, touch it on the tail with the net for a final blow out of ink and quickly net it in, then squeeze it firmly around the neck dispatching it before it can generate more ink.

If taking a picture then snap it whilst it’s still alive as photographing a dead washed-out white coloured squid does not make for a great picture. The same applies when photographing any species, always present it for good public viewing, nothing looks worse on social media than holding a dead fish with a broken neck or blood dripping from it.

When boating for squid it’s a good idea to have a scaler bag to clean your catch on the way back to the ramp. It can save a lot of time and difficulty trying to clean squid at the ramp and worse still taking it home to clean. All the ink stays at sea rather than polluting ramps or cleaning tables.

When choosing a scaler bag seek advice from the experienced staff at your local tackle store as an el-cheapo one may well break causing the loss of many hours of hard-earned catch, which I have learnt from experience. If you go to the Sherriff Agencies YouTube page there are quite a few videos on their use and how best to prepare them for the cleaning run.

Finally, cooking squid correctly is important and the best advice I received from an experienced fisher was to marinate the rings in Kiwi Fruit for a couple of hours prior to cooking, then crumb or batter and cook in very hot oil for around 30 seconds. Give it a try and I guarantee you’ll be pleasantly surprised.