Beach worms

In fishing, after having bought my main gears, what costs me the most is buying lure ans baits. When you are a beginner it is easy to buy what you don't need or loose lures to snags so you end up going for another trip to the store. The bait I'm buying most are pilchards. They are just all rounder baits used whole or filletted or in strippes / cubes. I also sometimes get some worms.

Realizing lately how much they cost me I'm looking for other ways to get baits.

With the weather getting warmer, collecting sand worms / beach worms is on of the free way to get quality bait.

I'm not writing a post on how to catch them, there are enough blogs and video out there, Google will help you.

I read a lot of fishos saying Gulp Sandworms are awesome, but I must be doing something wrong cuz never caught anything with them... But anyway live worms are just leathal to species like breams or whitings. You can even get the big jewfish with worms.

I will never buy frozen worms again, having tried them they don't seem to work for me.

If you're on budget, these are baits you can get for free if you put the effort on catching them.

Tomorrow the low tide is at 10am so I'll be beach worming in Dee Why at 8-9am. I'll be teaching the technique to some mates.

Steamed Whiting with vegetables and glass noodle

I've been asked to add more posts and photos about cooked fish, so there we go, this is my first post in a series about the way we eat fish in my home.
Most of these meals would have been prepared by my lovely little wife, I will try to add my own stuffs into the series, but I'm too much of a lazy bastard at home so be patient :-D
So for this first post, lets start with a simple recipe. We don't have a name for it so lets call it the "Steamed Whiting with Vegetables and Rice Noodles", that sounds like those dishes in a chinese restaurant, doesn't it?

First, scale and clean your freshly caught whiting. As this is a family meal and the fish will be covered with other items, presentation is not primary so we'll cut the tails and fins off, it will be easier to handle while eating.

In a container, pour some hot water and put in some glass noodle and leave it to expand for about 30 minutes.

In another container, prepare some fish sauce with a bit of sugar and stir to dissolve, we usually don't have exact measurement so taste your sauce before carrying on, you can add a bit of water to tame the saltiness of the fish sauce a bit.

Then find yourself a container that can go in the microwave oven, we will be using a glass one. Put some onion slices and spring onion slices and add your whiting on top. Pour over the sauce you have prepared earlier. Cover with a mix of slices of tomato, slices of onion, slices of spring onion, slices of wood ears mushroom. Sprinkle some black pepper on top. You should start to smell a nice perfume now. Cover the whole thing with the glass noodle.

Air tight cover the whole container with cling film and cook in a microwave at max temperature for 5 minutes to max 7 minutes depending on the size of the whiting. Cooked too long and it won't be tender anymore.

Alternatively, if you have a proper steam cooker then use it.

If you try this recipe then please give us some feedbacks/photos, if you encountered difficulties or have questions, hit the comments and we'll try to help.

My fishing gears

My little family has moved to Australia from the UK just a bit over a year ago as my Skilled VISA application has been approved after 2 years of preparation and 3 years of waiting... On approval we made the move 6 months later and landed in Casula at a friend's place without a job. With a 1 year old kid, you have to be careful with the expenses. I started to have some contracting jobs and was remotely working part-time for my previous employer (FT.com)

I got back into fishing after my cousin Tony took me for a fishing trip to the Saphire Coast (Merimbula, Tathra etc...). As a Christmas gift, he offered me a nice 6'6 Berkley fishing combo. I remember the first fish I caught were Yellowtail, Barracuda. We do eat the Yakkas they are good deep fried.

For a while, I used to fish the Georges River especially Chipping Norton, not knowing how unhealthy fish can be in the lake :-O. In one of my sessions there I met an old man who taugh me how to catch Herrings with a Sabiki rig. Seeing that I was a keen fisho he gave me some of his old gears: a bait net, 9 ft two rods, loads of sinkers and a torch. That was a real kick off for night fishing too. Herrings are also nice deep fried or filletted in Vietnamese style salad.

We then moved from Casula to Cabramatta West where we met Tina our landlady. A short while after, we moved again to Artarmon because I have found a stable job at SBS.

Balmoral Jetty was the closest fishing spot. At the time I also bought a Pen Rod Goliath from penfishingrods.com they are what we can call microlight fishing gears. You have to know how to handle a rod and play with the drag cuz even a yakkas will feel like a bream! Lot of fun really.

After we moved in, Tina, her partner Ron and her brother Chung came to visit us and went fishing at Balmoral and Cronulla. That was when Chung taught me how to catch beach worms to land some lovely Whitings. That was also when I switch from pier fishing to surf fishing!

Some people think that everyone living in North Sydney area are rich. It is true that virtually everything is expensive around here, but people living here do so because they work in the area and also for the life style that North Sydney offers. Rent in Artarmon is quite high and for a single income family it can be just at the limit of being tight. A lot of people we know would have stayed in the West and commute eveyday to workin the City, but I wasn't ready to do 2 hours a trip to/from work per day and my wife had enough of the boring life there. We'd rather tighten our expenses and have a better life style. Now I live 20 mins walk from work, 5 mins drive. That's a lot of hours saved per day to stay with the kid and missus or going fishing! Some weeks I would wake up everyday at 4.15am and head to Dee Why for a sunrise fishing until 7am when I head back home for a family breakfast and jump in the car for work. Some other weeks I would go at night or just take a break. Isn't that a dream life?!

So, being careful with our budget, I just can't justify buying $300 reels, $200 rods, not even half the price. But I needed to upgrade my gears for the surf, so eBay was my destination. In May, I ended up with a Saratoga Mawler Spin 11 ft rod + reel combo for less than $100. All felt good but the reel only lasted few sessions, after falling several times in water and sand, it just gave up on me. I reckon with more care and maintenance it would have lasted longer. But till today I'm still using the rod and it has performed way over my expectation. I replaced the dead Saratoga reel with Shimano entry level surf reel the Aerlex XSA 8000 for $99 from Otto's Tackle World in Drummoyne, these guys are great.

After a fishing session with Tina's family down south near Nowra, my gears got topped up with a 12 ft Shakespeare rod that Chung gave me and two Daiwa Regal 4000 BRi I bought from him for $100.

That is what I now use for all my fishing trips. For big surf fish I would use the Saratoga + Aerlex and Shakespeare + Regal. For whitings I would use the lighter Berkley combo or even the Pen Rod Goliath as most of the times whitings are hanging around just few meters from the shore.

Total expenses (on main equipments):

Berkley combo: $0

Saratoga + Shimano Aerlex: $193

Shakespeare + Regal: $50

Backup Regal: $50

Pen rod: $70

Total: $363

That would be approximately the price of a Shimano Stradic Ci4! And I'd say that the combo Saratoga + Shimano Aerlex 8000 would have been enough and would land very decent fish.

Here are some more photos.

The Berkley combo. The shark in the picture was caught with the Saratoga actually.

The Saratoga + Aerlex:

The Shakespeare (the Regal reel was on the Saratoga on the right of the picture):

The Pen Rod Goliath:

Finally some actions

It's been two weeks of fishing failure. Somehow big fish havr disappeared from the Northern Beaches and I'm not the only one saying that. Whitings are bitting but they are too small for the moment. So today I gave a try at Dee Why at night, results? Same thing... Except for this shark (someone knows which type it is?) must be weighing around 5+ kilos, it took me about 6 minutes to land it. I thought it was a damn big jewfish...  But that was a hell of a fight, running along the beach and in the water (lucky I put on my waders today), loosening/tightening the drag. I used 10lb braid line and 30lb fluoro leader in order to cast 3oz no-roll sinker without snapping the line. I'm very impressed with the ebay cheapo (not the one in the picture which is a 6'6 rod just there for size reference) Saratoga Mawler Spin 11 foot surf rod made in China. I bought it cuz I could not justify more expensive ones but never expected it to be that strong, as long as I play with the drag and angle the tip of the rod according to the strength of the fish I think it will handle more fish weight.

My best winter fishing trip of the year

Tina (pictured above), our former landlady and now a very good friend, tooks us down to Wollongong to see her big brother Ching who is a keen fisherman for over 20 years. He knows the good fishing spots in the surroundings. After more driving, we then arrived in Crookhaven Heads, Culburra Beach NSW.

We started fishing in the evening and got some not wow but legal size tailors:

I also caught a Shovelnose Ray:

Another fisherman gave us a fish he caught, probably a barracuda, that we used the next day as burley.

After a great diner that Tina has prepared, I went for an early bed time.

The alarm rang at 5am, but Chung was still asleep, he was on a night shift last day so was really tired. At 6am he finally woke up and the two of us went back to the fishing spot. At around 7am, the fish were on, in the next couple of hours we caught 16 really good size Tailors and Salmons all on pilchards.

For this trip, I brought with me my cheapo Saratoga Mawler Spin 11' rid with a Shimano Aerlex 8000 XSA. Chung gave me as a gift his old 12' Shakespear surf rod and lent me a small Bite 'N Run reel. I ended up buying his other Daiwa Regal 4000 BRi reel. They are equivalent to Shimano's Baitrunner reels.

Our rigs were simply a running sinker and a ganghook.

After 9am, the fish all went off, no more bites so at near 11am we called it a day.

Back to the holiday house, Tina prepared us a Sashimi of Australian Salmon. I can see most of you frowning here "What, you really eat Aussie Salmom raw?!". Well I was pretty new to Australia, having arrived just a year ago and started fishing even more recently, but I trusted Tina and his bro. So? I wasn't deceived it was tasty and Sashimi Soy sauce and wasabi complement it very well. Aussie Salmon don't have good eating reputation but there are definitely some ways of preparing/cooking it to make it good enough, sashimi is one of the way. I heard that butter fried is another way and my auntie also stuffs them with veggies and tomato and oil and put them in the oven. If you guys know other great eay to cook them, please hit the comments.

Here are some more pictures:

To finish, Chung gave us two very nice Black Breams he caught on the night before we arrived. Back home, we fried them Vietnamese way and they were really tasty:

Every one was really happy with this trip, the title says best winter fishing trip of the year, but I must say it's the best fishing trip of the year, period.