Lifting the hex

If you read my blogs you'll know of the trend I've seen that should make any environmentalist and fishing diehard a happy camper - the influx of juvenile jewies plaguing our waters is still in full swing. What a great situation this is with the apex predators of Sydney's estuaries clearly breeding well and in abundance.

I have a general beef with this situation though. My catch rate on jewies over 3kgs has almost disappeared. There are days when we hook 20 plus fish, but these are all infants seemingly muscling in on big brother's turf.

A few old salts that have lived on the Hawkesbury River as long as Adam was a boy, say that if small jewies are around, you can bet your bottom dollar the big ones aren't. Not too sure what the reason might be, but based on a school jewie's voracious appetite there might be very little food left for the bigger specimens to eat. One thing is for sure. If you catch a jewie, you can almost guarantee subsequent fish caught will be of similar ilk; I rarely catch jewies of drastically different sizes in a short time frame.

Being a schooling fish this pattern makes legitimate sense; fish generally school with others of similar age and size. But what complicates this theory is jewies are known to be cannibalistic. They will eat juvenile jewies, so if juvenile fish are abundant, where are the big ones? Who knows, they still may be there but are only dialled in on a particular food source; and therein lies much of the answer I guess.

Anyway, the good news is I broke my winter hoodoo. I hooked a beautiful fish recently, around the old fashioned 16 pound mark. I was flicking 6" plastics around all morning without interest. The moment I switched to a small Squidgy Wriggler hot tail in white body pink tail and smeared with S-factor, I came up trumps. As they say, even elephants eat peanuts.

While no monster jew, it was hooked on 4lb braid and 10lb leader on a 2-4kg stick and fought in close proximity to a jagged rocky shoreline. To make matters more interesting I hooked it on a Nitro Bream Series jighead, which has a light gauge hook for finesse fishing.
When the jewie was landed after a dogged 20 minute fight and placed in the Environet, the half straightened hook simply fell out. My luck was in that Saturday. After behaving itself for a photo it was great to see that jew swim away. I hope this is the beginning of a new trend.

Now the monkey is officially off my back!

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