Went down to sorrento pier for an evening session with Niroj and decided not to film, terrible decision.
I had an egi rod and a ultra light outfit with me and Niroj had the same but also had a heavy rod for spinning for larger salmon. I started off with a slim swim on the lighter rod just slow rolling it working around the pier and Niroj spinning for salmon. 4 casts in I had a bump on the plastic and then a solid connection to a tommie.
After this Niroj quickly grabbed his light outfit that was rigged with a little aji plastic, neither of us are sure what it is, and joined in the action.
After pulling in a few more tommies I had a hit that loaded the rod up but then didn't do much, I was pretty confused and then felt the distinct pulse of a squid. Got the net out for this one and manged to land a squid hooked under its hood with a plastic.
We stayed on the school of tommies fan casting in the area we had found them and got into a lot of fish and started experimenting with different techniques. It was crazy and amongst it all a bait fisherman on the pier came up and started abusing us for keeping undersized salmon and didn't want to hear anything about tommie rough and salmon being different species and even accused us of fishing without a licence which put a bit of a dampener on the session but we went back to catching tommies and eventually started releasing them as Niroj had enough bait for his upcoming surf fishing escapades. By this stage we were walking plastics just under the surface of the water for visual takes and weren't fussed if the fish made it on to the pier or dropped off, it was utter madness but like all good things it eventually came to an end.
This lead us to pick up the egi rods because we suspected the squid were lurking under the tommies and it didn't take long for the squid to start hitting the deck with a natural silver foil that Niroj was using to represent the tommies was picking off squid everywhere.
However as the sun started to get lower in the sky the squid started to favour the translucent red of my harimitsu ewc.
We kept working the squid jigs and started have some others on the pier trying to crowd the area we were in and casting over our lines trying to get in on the action to not much avail. We were picking up the majority of our squid out very wide with only the occasional smaller model in close and working this deeper water with fast sinking large jigs really paid off when a few larger squid pushed through the area and I picked off a couple of squid with hoods in the high 20s, nothing huge but better than the standard summer squid.
As the sun dropped over the horizon it was time for Niroj and I to leave as we both had things to do the next morning and had caught plenty for the evening. Final tally was 17 squid and an estimate of around 30 tommie rough landed with the majority released in two and a half hours on the pier. This session to me really highlighted the effectiveness of a proper egi rod and jigging technique for catching squid as Niroj and I were the only two using this technique and finished on 17 between us with the remaining 6 squid fisherman on the pier finishing on 4 squid and a cuttle combined.
Thanks for reading,
Cheers Alex
Ps. to the grumpy bait fisherman who decided to abuse us, next time you see some blokes rock up and start catching fish when you haven't caught anything, strike up a friendly conversation. Myself and plenty of others are happy to give a few tips about what we're doing to get onto the fish that day.
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