Fishing an estuary or tidal river

I had a chance to visit Broadbeach on the Queensland coast and the hotel I stayed at overlooked the Nerang River. This river is a wide, deep, and has a lot of rocks and other structure…

But this is a double edged sword…fish love structure so it provides a great place to fish – but structure also snags tackle so you have to be prepared to lose a bit.

 

The Nerang River holds plenty of fish but they respond to the tidal flows, much the same as many tidal rivers in Australia.

 

Fish feed well leading up to high tide but slow down after the tide changes. When they stop searching for food after high tide – often the only way to catch is by dropping a bait right in front of them…so lure fishing can work better then.  Since I don’t like to wander too much when I bait fish – I had to really work the best part of the tide – this is important…if you want to improve your chances of landing fish you need to know the tide times.

 

I found a spot near a bridge and targeted a pylon where the water slowed. I fished into the slower water because this is where it tends to drop food items that it is carrying…this is where fish will feed. .

I couldn’t find any tackle stores in Broadbeach to buy bait so I had to get everything I needed from the local supermarket.

 

 I bought some bread crumbs, chicken, fish, prawns, white flour and a few spices to make up my berley and  bait.

 

I cut the chicken into small pieces about the size of my little fingernail, cut some fillets from the fish(whiting) and peeled a few prawns. Lastly, I made up some dough from the flour and flavoured it with garlic spice…all this was to make sure I carried more than one type of bait…and all these baits are proven fish catchers.

 

I set up a two hook rig and a berley cage as my sinker.

 

I used bread crumbs as berley and added a little garlic spice to add a bit more attraction.

 

I used two hooks so I could try two different baits and work out what worked best. 

 

The first cast I used chicken and fish as bait. I set up my rod pointing towards the sky to keep as much line as possible out of the flow of the river and off the rocks near the bank I was fishing from….these rocks ended up costing me a few fish as they cut the line when the fish swam into them when they were hooked.

 

Within five minutes I hooked a good fish, probably a bream, but I never found out as it broke off after a solid struggle. This was probably the biggest fish of the day…

…isn’t it always what happens? You lose the big one…and worse still, the line broke at a weak point…it was frayed from a previous snag…and I didn’t cut it off like I should have. My bad!!

 

I tackled up again and cast in. I used the same baits and hooked another fish within a few minutes. This one was smaller and I got it straight in…a nice bream around 500gms. I quickly unhooked and returned the fish then baited up again… it had taken the fish bait but I wanted to be sure this was the preferred bait so I used the same combination of baits again and recast.

 

About ten minutes later I was into another fish and this was a good one. It stripped off line and took a bit of effort to keep it away from the structure that had lost me a fish before. It was another bream, a good one about a kilo in size and in absolutely perfect condition

I didn’t have anywhere to cook where I was staying so I retuned this fish to fight another day. 

 

After another hour and a half, I landed two more bream, a trevally and a flathead…and lost two fish in the rocks. 

 

The most successful bait turned out to be the prawns but they came off the hook too easy and small fish were taking them as soon as they hit bottom.

 

Surprisingly, the second best bait was the dough. I had mixed some very small pieces of fish with it ….and it worked great .

 

As the tide changed the fish stopped biting…I got a few more bites but after a while I got nothing…so I called it quits. 

 

It turned out to be a really good session. I had fished light gear using a telescopic graphite spin rod, small spin reel, berley and a selection of baits.

 

A couple of things I tried that really worked were simple, really effective and you can easily use:

  1. 1. Berley brought the fish in. When I didn’t use it the fish took twice as long to find the bait

  2. Prawns and dough were the best baits ….with dough being a killer bait for bream and prawns catching everything – but attracting lots of small fish.

  3. Before winding in I twitched the bait….this got me a few bites when things were slow.

  4. I was using berley so I tried to cast to the same spot each time so the berley landed in the same areaand built up a bit of a feeding area.

  5. I used small hooks, size 8 bait holders and these worked well on the small mouthed bream and trevally…but also caught the larger mouthed flathead. 

  6. I fished two hours leading up to high tide and half an hour after.  This seemed to be the best time for the estuary fish.

  7. Before I tackled up, I tied a small sinker to my line and cast to the area I wanted to fish and reeled in. This helped me “feel out” the bottom and find a few snags that would tangle my line. I made a mental note of where they were and tried (unsuccessfully on one occasion) to avoid them.

 This had turned out to be good fishing…and what I learned in this session would help me in the next. 

 

After-all,  this is what makes fishing a great hobby (obsession)…every outings different but you get better if you pay attention and try different things to hook those fish.

 

 

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