Date:Sunday, 18 February 2001 10:25
From: Peter Kerley
To: Tom Poczman
Subject: Fishy Tale

Heres a nice sized Mulloway which I caught a couple of weeks ago. I was on the Coorong side of the mouth a couple of kms away. I decided to get up before the spoggies and try some early morning antics.

My mate Brian must be getting old or just too much port the night before, as he decided not to rise to the occasion. We'd put plenty of berley in the water the day before and we thought to try an old trick my dad told me. That was to bury some mashed up pillies and tuna oil about a couple of inches down between high and low water on low tide of course.

Well as you can see from my photo something must of worked. I didn't have any scales but we both agreed about 25 to 30 pounder. I used a 14ft Snyder Glas "Regal 2 piece" and a Daiwa 6000 with 15kilo Platypus line and they both handled it easily. The tackle was 3 chemically sharpened 5/0 ganged to 50lb trace and a slightly longer trace to the biggest star sinker I could find.

The bait was a bit of a cocktail. A nice sized salt dried pillie dipped in tuna oil and also a nice long piece of beach worm. Putting halve it on the hooks, then the pillie, then what's left of the worm so the worm is on both sides of the bait. (boy those worms are hard to get as it was my first attempt).

I connected them to the line like a running sinker so when he hit he pulled the line and not the sinker as I was told that if you rig the bait to the sinker it can pull the hooks out of his mouth when he hits. Also I let him run a little before I gave it the big TUG. Took me about 25 minutes to get him landed (with the help of Brian eventually). Now I'm planning another trip back to the area so wish me luck good fishing.

PEDRO THE FISHERMAN