Over the cup weekend I had the opportunity to have a quick whiting tutorial with Whiting Guru Denis Barden. It was good to see some of the techniques he used and I was pretty keen to have a crack myself.
I hit up the toadie grounds off Clifton Springs in the Slayer this morning, the water was pretty dirty so I was hopeful of picking up a few ting too. I had thought originally to head to St Leonards to check out a few marks Denis gave me but with the forecast wind change from the south I decided to go somewhere with a bit of protection in case it arrived early. As a result it was a fairly lumpy morning without much shelter from the WNW wind that felt like it was blowing a bit harder than the live wind speed on Fishranger suggested. The beach had a lot of weed, presumably from that strong northerly we had earlier this week.
With the BerleyPro Orb on board I launched about half an hour before first light, I trolled for squid on my way out but didn't get any hits which didn't surprise me given the state of the water.
I anchored up near VYak member Peatop's favourite toadie mark and baited up and it wasn't long before a few of those buck-toothed ballsacks started hitting the deck, as well as the occasional whiting. (Some of the photos look a bit washed out where I didn't take the phone out of the cover)
At one point a heap of marks showed up on the sounder directly under the yak so I lifted one of the baits off the bottom and pretty quickly scored a couple of salmon, one of which definitely had to be released... would've made a good livie in the channel though.
As the sun came up the fish slowed down so I went out a bit wider looking for deeper water where hopefully the fish were still a bit more active. It worked and I got a few more whiting as well as more micro pinkies than I care to remember and more toads. The lack of squid meant I was reliant on the small bag of bait I bought with me and thanks to all the pests I was quickly running low. I was bringing in my very last bait to make sure it was still on the hook when something smashed it on it's way up to the yak and I ended up with a decent flathead with the last cast.
With no more bait, a reasonable bag of fish, and zero motivation to try plastics I pulled the pin at about 11:30. The final tally for the morning was six whiting, a flathead and a salmon. I reckon I went through over a dozen hooks thanks to the toadies gut hooking themselves (I always just cut them off, half the time the line is too chewed up to keep using anyway)
I started out using the rig described by Denis here (http://www.fishing-victoria.com/viewtop ... 10#p312628), however I found I was missing bites so I made a few changes on the fly. One thing about Clifton Springs is there's very little tide flow (and today was a small tide so there was even less flow than usual) and I thought that maybe without the current to hold the bait straight out from the three way swivel there might be too much slack to pick up the smaller bites. The other thing is my whiting rods are quite stiff graphite rods compared to Denis' nibble tip rods that picked up the tiniest touch on the bait. To try and overcome this I switched the longshanks for circle hooks thinking the fish might swim off and hook themselves more effectively than I could by striking at them.
That seemed to help but I thought I could improve it further by switching to a running sinker rig so I cut off the three way swivel, clipped on a smarty ezy rig and tied it all back up. I kept the 20cm dropper down to the sinker and used a long leader so it was still pretty much the same dimensions as Denis' original rig, just in a running sinker configuration instead of the paternoster. That seemed to work quite well, the bites were transmitted directly to the rod tip rather than being deadened by the sinker - not that it mattered as much once I was using circle hooks.
