| FOUR FISH |
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As we were doing the 5:30am drive from Victor Habour to Cape Jervis Johnny Cash was quietly singing The Ring of Fire and it got me wondering whether it was an omen about the fish we were about to get into. Were we an hour away from being thrown into a ring of fire which would see blisters on our thumbs and braid seared off our reels? Or on the contrary was the fact that we were listening to Johnny Cash at 5:30am going to be our undoing because some people in the car certainly weren't picking up fishy vibes from the cd.
As the saying goes, the proof would be in the pudding, and we were all keen to get stuck into it and see how it tasted. Personally I was hoping the pudding would taste a little different to how it normally did, for me at least anyway because I was planning to tackle the fishing from a different angle to everyone else - while they were fishing with baits I wanted to do it with a selection of jigs only, nothing natural, only artificial.
I'd kitted myself up with a number of jigs that have proved to be popular with fishos on the west coast of Australia when fishing reefs for pink snapper, nannygai, swallowtail and a bunch of other species that aren't found in South Australian waters. What I wanted to find out was whether they would be just as popular with the pink cousins in the cooler waters on the south coast of
Australia and the way to start looking into it was to see how my catch rates differed from the people using baits. It wasn’t going to be anything conclusive because so many factors influence the way fish feed and it was the first time I'd fished in South Oz waters for a long time but it would certainly help contribute to my knowledge on using artificial jigs for fishing in general.
 Fishing with lures is something that gets my blood running as much as sitting through an Adam Gilchrist and Andrew Symonds tonkfest (back in the day). There's something different about having a lure smashed than there is to your bait being hit. Sometimes it's the satisfaction of successfully managing to deceive the fish, sometimes it's in the creativity of using something other than bait and sometimes it's simply because lure fishing can be more challenging and success means you've risen to the challenge as an angler. Admittedly it can be expensive but the thrill of this style of fishing outweighs the cost for me.
In preparing for the trip I had decided to kit myself out with some new gear and this was another factor that had me chaffing at the bit to hit the water and get a fish on my line. I had picked up a Lemax Sea Game jigging rod, a high modulus graphite number that was lightweight, had a good fast taper to help stall any fish from getting back to the reef too quickly and I couldn't wait to test it out.
I'd matched the rod with a Daiwa Saltist 30, reels which are very well recognised for their quality and toughness often being labeled 'the affordable Saltiga' and it was loaded with 30lb braid which I thought would be more than ample for the weights, water depths and types of fish I'd be mixing with. To complement all that I had a boxful of jigs that I hoped would help to get me the knowledge, kudos and fish I wanted. In order to make it all happen I'd spoken to Mark Rilstone, the skipper of Lands End Pro Charters, about how the fishing off
Cape Jervis had been recently and how this style of fishing would work in his local waters. He mentioned that although December – January were the pick of the months for charter fishing there were still plenty of fish around and that we'd have no trouble getting into them. A quick look at the tides revealed that there wasn't going to be a significant amount of water moving between
Kangaroo
Mark's fished the area off Cape Jervis from the cliffs to the Continental Shelf on a recreational and commercial level since he can remember and he ventured into the charter business a few years ago so he knows the area like the back of his hand. When we met up on the morning of the charter he had decided that we were going to head straight to The Pages, a small group of islands half an hour east of the
The first spot we anchored at showed more activity on the sounder than the Adelaide Central Markets on a Saturday. I decided to start off using a 100 gram Japanese-style taikabura jig put out by Powerjig. These lures look similar to a small octopus with a slightly oblong shaped weighted head and rubber tassels for tentacles. There are two assist hooks interwoven with the artificial limbs via Kevlar cords and when combined together they give a fantastic imitation of an octopus or squid.
 Another squid and salmon taker. There was no shortage of these beautiful fish on baits today.
On the basis that there wouldn't be any noahs interested in the lures I joined a length of 50 pound Penn 10X leader to my mainline to help with any abrasion and dropped my jig down while the others around me dropped their baits. For the next twenty minutes we did what we could but caught nothing significant. Some small snapper and a number of rock cod were landed but nothing more. It was obvious these fish weren't hungry so we moved on.
The next drop saw the same amount of activity on the sounder but this lot was closer to the bottom rather than spread out through the water column like the previous spot. I decided to change my jig to the smaller 85 gram which I had in a blue rather than the orange thinking the colour and weight variations may provide a more attractive meal for the fish in this location. As the baits and lures went to the bottom the fish began to make their way to the surface – baits made from a cocktail of salmon and squid were accounting for snapper, nannies, the odd leatherjacket and a mix of other species that soon found their way back into the water. Through all of this the jigs were not performing as I hoped they would. The Powerjigs were catching a mix of swallowtail, rock cod and undersized snapper, but nothing to write home about.
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