Night fishing in Bondi Beach

Yesterday night I went to Curl Curl with a buddy for some jewie action but unfortunately no fish came to the meeting... When we came back we realised the barometer was pretty low.

Then I saw that tonight it was going to be 1022 hPa which is a much better number. But for a change Bondi beach was to be the spot. Another fishing buddy and his dad from Vietnam came along.

After 5 minutes I hooked up with something big. My Daiwa Bite'n Run (baitrunner) was wizzing once and twice before I decided to start the fight. A nice Tailor it was, bigger than last week! I was using a pilchard on a gang of three hooks in a paternoster rig set with another surf popper and a star sinker.

My mate then caught a bream and a very nice flathead.

Then near the end of the night the surf popper got me a pretty nice bream too.

Update:

Fried Bream with fish sauce and fried Tailor in tomato sauce.

Nice Tailor at South Curl Curl beach and catching beach worms single-handed

Last Spring and Summer was very quiet for me. Caught lot of bait fish but rarely any decent size catches. Before my travel back to Asia, I discovered the joy of surface lure fishing for Breams with my kayak fishing buddy. Got some success and failure in Tunks Park. My last failure was that memorable capsize when I lost most of my gears!

Here are my favourite surface lures for breams:

And here is my mate's awesome kayak setup:

My first bream on surface lure gave me that memorable bream kiss sound. It was really exciting to hear those kisses repeatedly before the hookup. Really cool.

Now Autumn has settled in, and just as like year, this is when it starts to get interesting. I got my first nice Tailor since the end of Winter this weekend. With another fishing buddy, we planned to go to Dee Why beach for some whiting and bream action but as we walked to the beach the lack of good surf and abundance of sea weeds on the shore just made us turn back to our cars. I suggested we should go to Curl Curl as its orientation makes it possibly be different. Arrived at North Curly, the waves were even smaller but from there we could see that the south corner was much better. So south we headed.

Arrived at destination, I started to hook half a yellowtail (I brought four with me just in case something big is swimming by) on a gang of three hooks. First cast was on the edge of the pool (go out, cast and quickly come back to avoid the washing waves that can drag you off the edge into the pool, believe me, it got me once...). Less than two minutes and the fish was on. After arguing on what fish was on, it turned out to be a very nice Tailor. We caught few smaller fish afterwards and also a nice catfish.

We made some nice vietnamese summer rolls with it:

Nice start of the season. It should go better and better till around June.

Today, I went back to Curl Curl at high tide but there was too many people and surfers at that time. But to my nice surprise, at one hour after high tide, I saw some beach worms pointing their head out looking for food. So I grabbed one pilly and started harvesting worms. It was amazing to see so many of them, two days ago there were none in Dee Why where I usually catch a few, but Curl Curl had plenty. So I decided to give some more practice of the single handed beach worming technique I saw on Youtube. I've finally managed to master it! That's just awesome as this allows me to hold a container in one hand and catch the worms with the other hand. I often forget to bring my bait box (belt) so this will help a lot.

Big fish in Lao

I recently went on holidays back to my birth country, Laos. We spent most of the trip in Pakse where my father was born, all his family is still living there, he is the only one having left the country.

During our trip we visited loads of beautiful places such as Khonephapheng Falls or the Vat Phu mountain temple. The place in the video below is called Pha Suam, there is a nice water fall and river with a suspended bamboo bridge. The area is a fish sanctuary and fish there have grown very big as you can see:

Setting a paid for catch and release would be nice.