Dry Fly Fishing Ovens River

With T-dogg too busy dealing with the "T-dogg & stinga" fanclub, which consists of only his father, he left it up to me to write a few things about our recent trip chasing the feisty stream trout around Bright. In my opinion the skill, knowledge and finesse required to trick a trout into taking your fly is far more rewarding than the tattersalls equivalent of fishing in the salt (sit around waiting for luck to win you the jackpot). T-dogg called his prioritization into question on several occasions. Deciding coffee with his boss (Mrs T-dogg) and the Harrietville market were greater attractions than the freestone mountain streams riddled with eager trout.

Forced to explore by myself I drove 150km, to 7 different spots and walked about 2km in total without wetting a line, due to horrible blackberry management around buffalo river. At 1pm I finally found a promising stretch of water on the Ovens river. The water runs pretty quick at these upper reaches so I elected for the royal Wulff in a 14. In the first 30 minutes I had close to 10 strikes and missed each and every fish. If anyone has noticed something similar with the wulff I'd love to hear about it, email me: missed_another_strike@shittinme.com.au

Despite the fish thrashing at this fly I couldn't stand missing them and tied on a red tag, started hooking fish but it didn't have the fishing thrashing like the wulff did. I couldn't express the relief i felt when I noticed a few duns popping off and in this quick water the 'dads favorite' chose itself. Antony from GVFFC gave me a few of these flies many years back, but whilst I don't think I ever used them i only had one left! Success begun immediately. 4/5 fish later T-dogg rocks up with his pug, in shorts with no gear! after I spent 3 hours driving and walking around, finding a nice river, observing the river, how to fish its likely lies and picking the right fly... I give 'the dog' my rod and he pulls in 3 fish whilst his dog enjoys a lengthy butt sniffing session with a few dogs from a nearby campsite. From this point on it was chaos, we went fish for fish until dark, even managing to get some good footage of the strikes (see the links), and all on the one fly! We would have caught about 25 fish, not huge but they are feisty as all hell. One of the most enjoyable days out I've had. This sort of action cant be beaten and no trip is ever the same.

The following day we tried a stretch about 1km downstream. Working our way up we came across a small creak entering the river, we decided to explore what looked like a beautiful spring fed creak, with slow gin clear pools about 2ft deep and a gentle riffle between each. Certain we would sight out trout we snuck up carefully and sure enough there was one right under the feeder stream at the top of the first pool. A small geehi beetle was selected and subtly flicked into the gentle stream, it drifted back straight over the fish, who moved up through the slow moving water, eyeballed the fly for an instant and then walloped it, engulfing it and half the tippet, I love this fishing! We followed the stream up further but found a fence alarmingly guarded with barbed wire. This fence was clearly designed not to stop livestock from getting out, but people from getting in! So after we finally got through it :-/ we realized what it was doing there, 10m upstream was a pond, this was a trout farm. Disheartened we turned to head back but saw a neat splash from a fish in the pond, we looked at one another and debated over the option, until the word 'poaching' was thrown into the conversation, and we scurried back down to the main river. But again it wasn't until about 4pm with the mayfly hatching that the fishing really picked up, and the same fly did all the damage. Like a racehorse of equal caliber 'dads favorite' will rest out his days in a good paddock with a pretty little female fly, and probably end up taxidermic in a museum somewhere. We will be selling his offspring. That's it from me, P-E-A-C-E out... 

LATCH

T-DOGG & STINGA

Whacking whiting

With T-Dogg away working on his right arm rapid movement techniques & chasing spinerfex fairies I decided it was time to hone my light gear work and chase some kidney slappers and calamari, so I got a crew together that looked like they were from boyzone and consisted of T-Doggs brother lachy. The morning got off to a flying start  with lachy tipping a bucket of motor oil over the back windscreen of t-doggs mrs near new black mazda cx7 thinking it was water. And he's a doctor, genious. After that minor incident we went searching for our targets off the tyabb bank. 

Much like the average Congan man (18cm) the whiting were long and the squid thick and vainy and we were getting black load everywhere. At one stage Lachy asked me if he could dress up as a secretary and put a pair of glasses on which I thought was pretty weird.

It was slack tide, which is the best and usually only time to get squid in western port, and we were casting orange money magnets at them as well as fishing fresh baits under a float and having great success. We had 7 on board, the biggest going to around 1.1kg and these suckers were going to be hitting the fry pan for once. 

After the tide picked up a little it was time to try black magics new whiting whacker, I thought the naming of it was a bit innapropriate as i have no idea how you could wack off a whiting with one of them but I can tell you that they catch heaps of whiting and the bite to hook ratio is through the roof. We were fishing them with strips of squid on each hook and having success that would rival vanilla ice. All were over 35cm with the biggest going to 45cm, or 450mm if that sounds longer. Burley was crucial to keeping them around and we ended up with around 20 delicious tings.

I find squid & whiting fishing incredible fun as there is always a lot of action and with the right gear the fight is really attractive. It's a great genre to take kids, beginners and wags. But people, you do not need 100 fillets of whiting. Just because the limit is 20 per person doesn't mean you have to take that many. If you've got swimmers like Ian Thorpe and are supporting 15 kids then by all means the rest off us should be more cautious.

T-dogg & Stinga



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Australian Bass

My wrist hasn't been this sore in ages and it's not because I'm working away from my mrs at the moment. No, it's because I've been getting wacked by big bass all day. Recent floods have devastated Brisbane but if the smiles of the young kids i saw today catching bass after bass are anything to go by then they are certainly moving forward.
With every dam in the Brisbane region over capacity the bass have managed to get themselves into the joining creeks and rivers and are there in big numbers.

Previously to the last two days bass fishing, being a Victorian, my only knowledge of bass was that is fished for by people wearing shirts with more advertising on them than your average NASCAR driver, using 1/2 pound line with these big spinny things as lures. Don't get me wrong, I've caught plenty of bass, I've even won tournaments...... On the playstation. Anyway I was to be proven extremely wrong. I saw a young 3 year old girl today catch a 40cm+ bass today on a garden worm with 20 pound line. It really was great to see so many young kids enjoying the fruits of a well stocked and maintained fishery. I was pretty light on for lures as I found out a new strategy Brisbane tackle shops are using to sell more lures. "oh mate, let me show u a new way to tie you leader on to your new reel." I'd stopped listening after the 3rd triple twist and 78 turns later I had my new wiz bang leader knot which conveniantly slipped as I cast my $25 lure in. Business savy. so I even jumped on the garden worm band wagon and ripped in a few.

After playing around with the kids catching bass after bass on a brown worm soft plastic with a jig head spinner the afternoon was upon me and it was time to chase the real stuff up at the spill way. Never catching anything on a popper before I was really excited. First cast in and my lure got smashed off the surface by a 45cm bass and that was to be the first of many. My popper looked like a dazed fish falling over the spillway and the waiting fish were as keen as a college school girl to give it a go. I had a ball watching my purple popper getting ripped off the surface time and time again until the all mighty bass took it away from me.

I felt like my dog had died. Like I was in detention and little Jimmy was kissing my girlfriend and getting to first base before me. I even considered what body part I could sacrifice to remake a popper. But I conceded. I had had an absolute ball and sat there for a few minutes to reflect on how beautiful it was and that god dam bass had my lure. I was going to retire it....

T-dogg & Stinga

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Calamari. To eat or not to eat? that is the question!

It’s the age old debate, is calamari better as bait or on the table?

When my father first laid eyes on me in the delivery room his first words to my mother were, “yep, just as I thought, he’s gonna be a calamari user, not an eater”.  And In most cases he was correct.  It’s the elephant in the room when ever your eating it or using it as bait.  Someone’s always thinking to themselves, “you jizzbeard, this could be a 25kg gummy and your kids feeding it to the dog..” Or , “I can’t believe this herpee-harvester is using this as bait while my wifes getting cabbage on toast for dinner”. And most people are either one or the other, I havent known many splitters in my time (someone who users some for bait and some for the table)

For us, we are users. It has contributed to around 75% of all gummy sharks we have caught and on occasions has clean swept all other baits. It will catch big reds and is the number one bait for mulloway. But our mate Con, from Rye,  he loves eating them so much he reckons each time someone catches a calamari and doesn’t eat it, the fishing fairy gets beat up by her alcoholic fish fairy husband.  Fishing Corinella a month ago we fished snelled rigs with strip baits and heads from one calamari as well as a plether of other fresh baits which gummies love. We caught 3 gummy’s all on the squid as well as 2 banjo pattersons, a couple of Michael Jakson sharks and an eagle ray and the other baits weren’t touched.

Catching calamari in both western port and port phillip is easy but some struggle in W.P as we did for years because no lint licker wants to tell you how to do it.

Port phillip is rather easy. Drifting money magnets that have had more technological advances than a holden barina and cost around the same too, over weed beds.

Now W.P is another story,  Squid feed at slack tide. Ever had your rod tickling over at slack tide but you cant seem to catch it? Well that’s calamari and theres a Few ways to catch them.

1 – You can jig money magnets at them in a variety of colours that could rival Dulux

2- Reel your line in really slowly and have a mate standing with a net,  the calamari will hold onto your bait and you can bring it to the surface, then place the net behind the squid and as it lets go it will swim back into your net and bang, squid on board and you’ve saved yourelf an ink facial. Unless your into that stuff like Stinga. This method believe it or not accounts for most of our calamari because they respond really well to fresh baits and berly

3 - The old bait on a squid prong under a float. You can float it at any depth and you’ll get them but we find closer to the bottom the better.

Use these methods baisically on all weed beds in western port on slack tides.

So after you’ve landed a bag of cephalapods, Its decision time.

Bait or Table?

That is the Question.

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First Western Port Blog

Hello World,

We are T-Dogg & Stinga, two young best mate who love fishing and we where the two young blokes down at the boat ramp watching people cleaning Big fish and gummies, while we are cleaning our one whiting, and asking "Where'd you get that mate?" and in return made to feel like we were the worst people on earth for asking. Well we are trying to break that mould because we have learnt how to catch big gummies to 20kg regulary. we've been made to look like fools by some of our fellow fisherman but also helped out by some amazing fisherman, we've payed good money for charters and caught nothing, how did we do it. we asked, and we asked, and we asked poeple how to do it. Our reports seem to get circuled around the place but you can read them all in depth here!!!! hopefully we can save you the effort we went through.

Fishing Report 27/3/2011 Western Port, Point Leo.

With the weather looking as beautiful as a model's fart in the morning, we decided that we definetly deserved a day off. On heading out to the western entrance of western port we had little metal slugs all ready to go on our light gear because at the moment they are like girls at EVE nightclub chasing AFL players. Everywhere. so sure enough  on our way out there we ran into some of these girls and even though having there eyes on the buff boys of the AFL they were still pretty dam keen on our little metal slugs and we had 10 in the boat in 5 mins. What great fun they are too, you can catch your 20kg gummies, 10kg snapper, but give me a 2kg salmon and there about as fun as any fish on the planet.

We then headed to the edge of the main channel off point leo, sounded around until we found the bottom of a nice drop off and dropped anchor. There was 3 hours till low tide and the water was still screaming though. We dropped our baits done which consisted of fresh yak, squid and that salmon we had earlier. the squid was going off instantly getting eaten by parrot fish of around 2kg, we couldnt keep any down there which we were dissapointed because it had contributed to alot of our gummies recently. so we stuck with yak and salmon, 20 mins in our mate THE DON, who is looking a little like Chubaca at the minute, was on and shortly had a lovely specimen of 13kg on the boat. A few happy snaps and the gummy was off to probably jerk off to some freaky German gummy porn. As the tide started to slow the gummy action really heated up and off went stinga's charter speacial, Screaming it was and the first run left him with only 50m of line left. THE DON was calling stingray to piss him off but we all new we were onto a big gummy here, and it was. 18Kg to be exact. Beautiful big girl also swam away unharmed.

As the tide slowed more salmon were busting the surface right at our boat so we casted into them willy nilly screaming out everytime we hooked up. We were getting wacked pretty hard by THE DON, i mean the salmon, Wierd?

Getting serious i was on again but lost whatever was there, reeling it up to reveal my leader was severed through the middle which made me think there was a toothy around. So the only trace i had was a dirty big mako 13/0 trace which i dropped down with a whole fillet of slimy. and within minutes it was also screaming off, we werent sure what it was gonna be as we were sure it wasnt going to be a gummy, sure enough, Gummy 10kg. Perfect, we'd thrown 3 big girls back already but this one was going on the table.

i Could go on and on about how Stinga thinks he's awesome but has commitment issues, or how blue goes really well with my eyes, but i am unsure if this will get read by anyone so i cant be stuffed at the minute. so hopefully ive done this right and you can comment me or whatever you do on this site

PIECE OUT

T_DOGG & STINGA

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