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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