6-9-09
Being childless sometimes has it’s advantages. For me, it gives me the opportunity to go fishing pretty much all the time but in the back of my mind, as I may be the envy of some dad’s, my innings will one day come to a halt….not a screeching one I hope!! On Father’s day I took the opportunity to catch up with a good friend of mine, Neil Whillans, who studied acupuncture with me here in Brisbane. Neil and I have had some epic days of fishing in the past when we would skip lectures because the weather was great to chase bass at Lake Samsonvale or stingrays in Cabbage Tree Creek. Those were the days.
So with work and general life separating us, it was awesome to have the opportunity to take Neil to the infamous breaming haven of Redcliffe. Neil is not new to fishing but very new to catching bream on shallow running hardbodies and plastics. Our first port of call was Castlereagh Reef at Scarborough where we found the tide rising rapidly due to the moon phase of the previous night. I loaded up Neil with a light spin outfit comprising of GLoomis 820s GL2 rod with a TD Sol 2500 spooled with 4lb Fireline and a 6lb leader. The lure of choice was the trusty Jackall Chubby shallow in Pink Suji shrimp.
Now the biggest issue for me when taking someone new out breaming isn’t whether they can swim if we crash or hunt and gather if we got stranded on a deserted island, but it’s putting them onto fish!!! You talk breaming up to so many people, that you don’t wanna be eating you words and catch ‘donuts’ (for newbies that means zero fish!!) or spend the day talking about ‘remember the old days’ stories. So this morning I was keen to make it a cracker.
As we cruised around the northern tip of Castlereagh, the morning started off a little slow with only a handful of hits and 2 snags. Then it wasn’t too long till Neil was on to a nice healthy 26cm FL (Fork Length) Bream putting up a nice fight in shallow water which was a great introduction to breaming for Neil. We then cruised over some other reefs in the area to see if bream had started feeding up over them with the flooding tide. Using the SE wind, we drifted over some rubble flats close to the shore where I knew would hold fish during the flooding tide. It wasn’t too long and we had hit the jackpot. Pitching long casts with the wind proved to be the best recipe as we started nailing good bream around 24cm-28cm while cruising in the shallows. The fish seem to turn on the bite pretty fast and after several drifts of this area we picked up 20 odd legal bream with the biggest going 31cm FL and to add excitement I pulled a nice 28cm FL Squire who was cruising in 3ft of water looking for an early feed. Neil’s biggest Bream for the day was a nice fat 27cm which fell victim to the Jackall Chubby spell. As the wind stayed around the 10-12kts from the SE, this restricted us to the top of Scarborough which we weren’t complaining too much as the action was aplenty. We went further out to another section of reef that is normally visible at low tide but under on the high and motored over the top of it in search for more ravenous feeding bream. This proved to be good as we nailed plenty of bream mainly being undersize but enough to keep the excitement going for us.
All in all we had a cracker day as it was great to introduce some new blood to the breaming world and to get onto some good fish really topped off the morning. As Neil got an early leave pass for Father’s day to go fishing with me, I’m sure it’s one he won’t forget for a while.
Happy Breaming
Grayson
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