A crab test

I went to Mandurah boat harbour to test a new crab pattern for a free fall fishing for breams.

The idea is to drop a fly straight down from the jetty along pylons, and hopefully breams will grab a fly while it is falling down to the bottom.

There were a lot of chases and bites on the crab pattern while other imitations like bait fish and squid were being ignored. At the end, however, the fly was still not right enough for those finicky breams.

Many fish including some good size ones came out to look at the fly, and some fish even hit the fly, but hits were too tentative to get solid hook ups.

No bream, but got tarwhine on the crab pattern today.

Face up

Pictures of different fish which I encountered this weekend.

週末に出会った魚の写真です。


Our old favourite, black bream.


Herring that I caught on a popper today.


Gobbleguts caught on friend's fly. I've never seen this fish before.


This tarwhine decided to hit my friend's popper.

Popper and a fair game

According to my friend, there is no herring which is not hungry. I don't now if this is a true statement, but it seems that herrings are always eager to hit flies if they are around.

I fished in Mandurah today, and I had a good time to catching them on a small popper. Although I love catching herrings, they get hooked up too easily sometime as they can't stop hitting anything that moves.

To make thing more interesting and fair, I tend to switch a fly from a steamer to a surface popper when fishing gets too easy. Herrings hit poppers well, but chasing them on a popper can be more challenging and interesting than hooking them on sub-surface flies.



The last half hour before the sun set was very interesting today. The water became flat as wind dropped, and on the incoming tide, the whole estuary looked like a big slow moving river.

I then saw tiny rises kept popping up in front of me. The rises were very subtle like those dimple rises that trout make when they were rising to ants or beetles.

First I was casting streamers and my squid pattern which were working well earlier, but they didn't hook up any fish this time. So, I changed my fly to the popper, and I cast it out to where I saw rises. The fly went plop, plop, and bang! The hit was big, and fish went flat out.

The fight was much stronger than other fish that I was catching. I got the fish close in but the hook came off. It was too bad that I couldn't find out what took my popper but it was a good way to end the day.


オーストラリアン・ヘリングは、ライトウェイト・ソルトウォーター・フライフィッシングの好敵手。色々なパターンで釣れて、クロダイの様なパワーはないですが、ジャンプを繰り返すファイトは、３番とか４番の竿ならとてもエキサイティングです。

群れが目の前を回遊していると入れ食いになる事が多いですが、脚の速い魚なので、いったん群れが離れてしまうとパッタリ釣れなくなります。

＃６から＃８位の小さなディシーバーなどのストリーマーで釣れますが、活性が上がると釣れすぎる事もたまにあり、そういう時は、フライをストリーマーからポッパーに変えると面白い釣りができます。