The first leg of my winter seabass season has come to a close as the fish will be moving out to the open sea over the next week or two as they get ready to spawn, they won't be back till January sometime. It's been interesting as we've been experimenting with some very big flies.
I'm not sure the really big flies are that necessary. Naturally I've caught fewer fish than normal, but that was to be expected. I have caught a few nice bass and come into contact with a couple of huge fish, most notably one that would have smashed my PB which was lost at the net. The isssue is, I've not caught any more big fish than usual. In fact, some of the best fish I have caught came to the usual 7-20cm flies. This week for example I caught a beautifully conditioned 65cm bass on a little rubber candy, a second 67cm fish came to a 20cm Sedotti slammer.
I spent at least half of the trip fishing a 30cm topwater fly for one chase from a fish that either missed or rejected on the eat, which has been fairly normal over the trips this season. Masuda reckons lure fishing for these herring and feeders is easy, but the fly seems less effective. The amount of water we can cover is probably part of it, I suspect action, water push and sound is also a contributing factor. It's hard to replicate the big lures in a fly that is castable, It's easier on subsurface flies as you can add weight to overcome the air resistance, but on topwater you can't really do that without having to add more foam. A foot long beast is so light it's a reasonable proposition on a #10, as is a Slammer of the same size with it's leaded underbody and keel. But a big popper head or 2 and a spinner blade on a 30cm shanked fly makes casting hard work, there's no way I'm going heavier than a 10 weight for these fish.
So is the extra work worth it? I'm not sure it is. Now of course if I had landed an 80cm+ fish I might feel differently, but I'm sure I wouldn't have had worse results if I'd stuck to flies of 20cm and under. Certainly I could have tied a 4/0 Bob's banger around 20cm and had the same degree of success as I did with the 30cm job. I suspect I might even have caught a couple of fish that the 30cm fly was too big for. After New Year the big bait won't be around so much, so I'll have to wait till next autumn to put that to a real test. Now I'm looking forward to some cricket score nights in January.
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