Tight bags and tarwhine on the Swan

No sooner has the 2022 ABT season been wrapped up have we begun again with the first round of the 2023 Daiwa bream series in Western Australia.

The Atomic sponsored Swan River qualifier in Perth was the battleground for 16 boaters and 13 non-boaters, competing for their ticket to the Grand Final in Port Stephens, New South Wales, at the end of the year. This year for WA anglers there are two boater and two non-boater spots, as well as a spot for the angler with the most AOY points that hasn’t automatically qualified.

Joseph Gardner took the reins for ABT and ran the knowledge goes a long way when the ABT comes to your hometown and it certainly helped Joseph Gardner secure his breakthrough ABT win by just 20g.

Having got some good sessions in before the pre-fish ban, Gardner had a good feel for the area already when it came time to pre-fish.

“I knew there were fish everywhere in the system, but I knew the upriver fish were going to feel the pressure a lot more, so I decided to stay down the front where it was less pressured and congested,” he explained.

At just 3.85m long and fished by casting them into the current, parallel with the bridge pylons and letting them waft down underneath. If the lure made it to the bottom without getting eaten, he gave it ‘a few small rattles’ to imitate a loose mussel tumbling along the bottom.

Most of the time the bream would eat it on the drop while it was sinking alongside the pylon and the action wasn’t required.

Casting accuracy trumps distance around pylons where it is essential to get the lure within a couple of inches of the structure every single cast. A shorter length rod around the 6’6” to 7’ length provides far better casting accuracy, so Gardner opted for a comfortable 6’8” 1-3kg JML Accurate presentation –short enough to be accurate but still long enough to get good leverage and keep fish away from the pylons.

He paired this with a strong 2500 size Daiwa Exist spooled with heavy PE 1 Yamatoyo jigging braid and now firmly set tournament in the absence of Steve and Nicholle, getting some good karma for his efforts finishing in first place. In a weekend where tarwhine played a big part in the winning bags, He weighed 7kg neat for his final weight to finish just 20g ahead of second place Karl Stait, who exclusively weighed the bream sub-species.

In the non-boaters we saw another first-time winner in Matt McCarthy punch his ticket to the Grand Final while the Atomic Big BREAM prize of $500 went to Kim McIntyre.

A little bit of local

1 the powered by a 25hp motor, having the smallest boat in the field certainly didn’t hold him back from having a go. In some ways, it became an advantage when he could sit back and watch the other boats ahead of him head to other spots and he could choose his accordingly.

With others choosing popular spots at the front of the system Gardner settled with the causeway bridge at Herrison Island for the first half of each session. He and his non-boaters each day had a bag in no less than 15 minutes and had the rest of the day to upgrade, with the bite getting better as the tide changed and started to run in

BOATER RESULTS later in the morning. Boat control and positioning around bridges is paramount and with the addition of a new Lowrance GHOST trolling motor to his boat – supplied by Tacklewest – Gardner was able to hold into the current behind the pylons all day with ease.

“That’s probably been the best piece of technology I’ve put on my boat so far; it’s made fishing so much easier for me,” he said.

Gardner makes his own mussel-style lures under the Blue Lip Baits banner, which he used almost exclusively for the whole event. He used the dark knight colour and

Full results at abt.org.au

2

3 a 6lb leader, however he went as high as 8lb over the course of the event.

Tarwhine featured in both the top two bags as the big schools were in good condition and relatively easy to catch, with Gardner himself bagging one on day one and three on day two to carry him to victory.

As for the first guaranteed boater entry for the 2023 Grand Final that he earnt himself? Well, Gardner said he’ll be ‘making every possible effort’ to get to Port Stephens for the event and compete for top honours.

What he lacked in local knowledge, Perth’s newest local Karl Stait more than made up for in skill. Stait had a plan to target tarwhine from before he even pre-fished and executed his plan almost to perfection, falling an agonising 20g shy in the end.

Since the recent addition of tarwhine to the list of weighable bream species, not often have we seen them actively targeted in hopes of outweighing black or yellowfin bream. In fact, Stait might be the first angler we have seen weigh a full limit of tarwhine each session and finish on the podium.

He found the tarwhine could match the black bream for size, they schooled together in large numbers and they were far easier to catch than the black bream.

Karl broke down his plan by saying,

“I knew no one else was going to target them and from a few sessions before the pre-fish ban I knew there was definitely enough size there to win the comp. On pre-fish I could see them stacked on the pylons with my Lowrance Active Target and after I caught a 34cm-forker off them I had my plan for the weekend.”

Being only new to the area, Karl brought a fresh set day. “I remember looking at the time on day one and it was exactly 8:32am when I pulled up and I had my bag by 8:40am. I was absolutely stoked,” explained Stait.

When he arrived, he had the last of the run-out tide, which was his preferred tide for bridge fishing, and this is the period where he caught all his fish. Once the tide turned and began to run in the bites slowed.

The lure he caught his bag and most of his upgrades on each day was the new rattling model mussel vibe made in WA by Cal Blair at Outback Breamer Baits.

He used a Millerods

Twitch Freak paired with a 2500 Daiwa Luvias spooled with 14lb Gosen braid and

a few rod lengths of 10lb Yamatoyo Chinu Harris leader – he favours a long leader for this technique.

When the bites slowed and he moved to the Canning Bridge to search for more fish he also used a River2Sea Baby vibe in black to put a few fish in the boat.

Karl runs a number of Lowrance products on his boat and two essential pieces of his success were his ghost trolling motor and his Active Target transducer. The spotlock on the GHOST trolling motor kept him in perfect casting position while the active target allowed him to see precisely where the fish were sitting on the pylons and how they were reacting to his bait.

A second place gives Karl the valuable AOY points he will need if he is qualify for his first ABT Grand Final.

Another angler joining the winners circle for the first time this event was non-boater champion Matthew McCarthy, who somehow managed to win by an even smaller margin than the boaters with only 10g separating him and Ruan Van Der Berg.

McCarthy fished with boaters Paul Burton (day 1) and Greg Cooper (day 2) and had the utmost praise for his boaters each day.

Fishing from the back of the boat presents many challenges, of which one of the most difficult is the bad casting angles. As most non-boaters can attest, past these smaller models, the bigger fish were sitting directly underneath them picking off the scraps the little ones were dropping. fishing bridges from the back of the boat is extremely difficult, so it is a testament to McCarthy’s ability that he was able to still get it done. His day one bag of 1.730kg was the heaviest of his two bags and those fish came doing just that, slotting casts in where he could around the pylons.

His kicker fish of the day came on a Prolure Clone Prawn in tiger UV on a 1/28 TT hidden weight jighead. Being a bigger bait, he tied it on when he was looking for upgrades as the day went on.

With Paul Burton on day two, the pair picked their way downstream from take-off and just slotted into banks where they could. An actionless morning until 10:30 was turned around when they picked up their fish in a 15-minute flurry on a flat in Belmont.

“We were fishing a flat and I noticed the wind had come up which seemed to bring them on straight away” McCarthy said.

He fished the same Squidgie Bio-Tough from day one but with a minor alteration, explaining that,

“The Squidgies are quite a long bait and I actually found that when I of eyes to the venue, which helped him think outside the box in this way. He made the long run through multiple 5 knot zones down to the front of the system where he had found the big schools of tarwhine hanging around the Fremantle and Canning Bridges.

The risk of an hour and half run was immediately outweighed by the reward of an almost instant limit each

With just 10g between himself and 2nd place, Matthew McCarthy cut it fine but got the job done for his first non-boater victory.

The duo started at the Windan Bridge where McCarthy got his bag using a Squidgie Bio-Tough Wriggler in bloodworm colour rigged on a 1/22 size 2 Gamakatsu round 25R jighead, casting the lure hard against the pylons.

“I like these jigheads because they have super sticky hooks and the round head gives the lure a better action,” he explained.

He figured out that the smaller fish were feeding high in the water column on the face of the pylon and if you could get your lure cut them in half, reducing the profile, I started to stick bites where before they were short striking it and missing the hook.”

Around structure, McCarthy chose the rod Ian Miller designed specifically for extracting fish out of the nasty stuff – a 6’7” 2-5kg Millerods Brawler.

Alternatively, on the flats he used the 7’3” 1-3kg Millerods GrubFreak paired with a 2020 DAIWA Luvias extra high gear in 2500 size, spooled with Toray Sea bass PE 0.6 braid and 5lb Yamatoyo Chinu Harris leader.