By Tom Deer
With the water starting to warm up myself and Shane Murton headed up to Port Pirie for session on the YF whiting , made all the more exciting as they were tuned into and keen on surface lures.
We traveled up separately, as Shane wanted to stay on for the opening of the snapper season, and got ourselves a cabin at the Beachside Caravan Park. After a brief chat with the owner, Paul Marks, we decided to waste no time putting the boat on the water and didn’t travel far from the ramp, 50 metres in fact, before I boated the first cracking whiting, at about 45cms.
We had three days on the whiting catching about 40 each session and we used a variety of lures. Shane was using a poppers, blades, and soft plastics while I stuck with the tried and true surface lures from Megabass, Bassday and Atomic. At times there there were up to 20 whiting chasing down the lure all trying to get a piece of it.
The standout lure on day one was the Bassday Sugapen, however day two the bite changed a bit and the Pop X worked better. Then on day three it seemed that the whiting had a preference for the K9 Walker. Whether it was “walked”, popped, or slid across the top, the result was the same. If you don’t hook up immediately, slow the lure down, or even pause it to allow the whiting to catch up to it, at which time you can re-commence the retrieve and will usually get slammed.
Another thing that we did to increase the hookup rate was to change the trebles over to Gamakatsu fine wire size 14. These not only fitted into the mouth of the whiting better than the standard hooks on the Sugarpen and Pop-X, they also assisted in pinning the fish in the side of the head after a miss aimed attack.
In my view Port Pirie is not only a great place to visit for King George whiting and snapper, it has to be the YF whiting capital of SA.
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- They keep comming
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- Megabass Pop X with a sneaky hook system
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- Even the colourful Tequila Sunrise worked well
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- Nice YF whiting from near town ramp
