Fishing in the Good Old Days by Bob Kearney

Author:Bob Kearney [Kearney, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522878356
Publisher: MelbourneUP
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

Fresh bait

From the time I was a five-year-old fishing from the banks of the Tweed River in Murwillumbah, the importance of having fresh bait was stressed. Live bait was even better. Dad had one of his friends make a scoop net for me out of flymesh, mounted on the rim of a bicycle wheel, attached to a handle about 4 feet long. With this I was assured of always having access to live juvenile school prawns, which were plentiful around the banks of the river whenever it was not in fresh.

Everyone knew that live worms were better than dead ones and dead yabbies were next to useless. Starting with these ‘givens’, I was to progressively appreciate some of the finer benefits of truly fresh bait.

Over my many years of fishing my perception of the importance of fresh bait has matured. Experience has honed it to the point that I now accept that extremely fresh bait can be, in the right circumstances, hugely more effective than fresh bait, but that effectiveness does vary with the species and circumstance.

I have assumed that there is general acceptance that the fresher the bait, the better it is. Live bait is almost always better than dead bait. Even the ‘liveliness’ of live bait can be a factor (chapter 9). Here, I provide just a couple of examples of observations that support the assertion that extremely fresh bait is likely to produce catches that are not only bigger but can also be remarkably different to those taken with bait that was as good as you could normally expect to buy.

In 1962 Dad was driving me from Coolangatta to Kingscliff via Frank Dunn’s bait shop at the mouth of the Tweed River in the hope that we might be able to buy some garfish. There was not much chance as they rarely had garfish, even if they were the only ones who had them for sale. Garfish had become accepted to be the tailor bait. They sold out very quickly when anybody did have them. But they were such a prize that it was worth a try.

We arrived at the shop at about 11 a.m. to have the lack of garfish confirmed. But while we were still discussing the possibility that garfish might become available later in the week, Frank Dunn himself pulled up outside the shop. He had a trailer behind his truck and it was filled with large anchovies (froggies) that had just been netted on Duranbah Beach, about half a mile away. Frank and his crew immediately set about processing them with very liberal quantities of coarse salt.

Dad had always had a serious disregard for froggies as bait. He was of the opinion that they were too soft to stay on the hook. Fish did not really like them anyway. Besides, he thought they were usually too big for bream but too small for tailor. But I was reasonably confident he had never used them. He was merely repeating a popular and accepted fisherman’s myth.

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