Mangrove Jack

Scientific Name : Lutjanus argentimaculatus

Mangrove Jacks are members of the sea perch and pacific snapper family.
Mangrove Jacks live in estuaries, rivers or tidal creeks until they reach sexual maturity. They then move to offshore reefs. Sometimes they are found well up in the freshwater reaches of rivers.
Mangrove Jack prefer dense cover, and when they attack fish, bait or lure, they dive back into that cover, often resulting in snags and cut lines. When they are on offshore reefs they are much easier to capture, but they are a very powerful fish.

Fishing methods
Find structure when fishing tidal creeks and if you're in luck the jacks will be there. Having said that, there are occasionally snags which have jacks written all over them but in fact are home to just small GTs or queenies. When casting lures you frequently have to live dangerously and get in tight to a snag or rock face. You have to accept that jacks will simply refuse to leave their ambush spot to whack even a well-presented lure. I favour twitching the rod tip and winding only half a turn at a time to keep the lure in the strike zone for as long as possible. Occasionally a jack will hit a sitting lure cast in tight to a snag. It's the same with baits - get them right in there and hang on!

tag: Siakap merah

Skipjack tuna

Scientific Name: Katsuwonus pelamis

The skipjack tuna, Katsuwonus pelamis, is a medium-sized perciform fish in the tuna family, Scombridae. It is otherwise known as the aku, arctic bonito, mushmouth, oceanic bonito, striped tuna, or victor fish. It grows up to 1 m in length.

It is a streamlined, fast-swimming pelagic fish, common in tropical waters throughout the world, where it inhabits surface waters in large shoals (up to 50,000 fish), feeding on fish, crustaceans, cephalopods and mollusks. It is an important prey species for large pelagic fishes and sharks.

Skipjack tuna live in temperate seas of the world. skipjack tuna can be easily recognized by the four to six long dark stripes on its underside. Skipjacks are open ocean fish demanding clear water to feed. Often near the surface during the day they usually go deep at night. Like other tuna skipjacks feed heavily on smaller fish and squid and are even cannibalistic at times.

Chasing stripies is best done with lures as they love dining on a fast moving menu. For casting a light spin stick and threadline reel loaded with 2-6kg mono, or braid, are just ideal, with a metre of 10kg mono trace at the business end of your rig. And for trolling I would probably use a small baitcaster rather than a spinning outfit.

The list of casting lures that will catch stripies is endless - poppers, bibbed and bibless minnows, metal slices, lead-head jigs, flies and even soft plastics. When it comes to trolling lures, feathers and small skirted lures are very effective.


When sighted within casting range of the rocks the most important thing is to be quick and get your casts in before the school races away. High-speed metal lures and lead-heads are most effective in these circumstances.

Offshore you will often find stripies hard to get close to, as they have a disturbing tendency to sound when a boat approaches. At times, if you simply cut the motor a couple of hundred metres from the fish they will continue feeding and travel past your boat within casting distance.

However, probably the easiest way to catch stripies is to troll past them with small skirted trolling lures well out the back of the boat. By turning the boat back in the direction of the school once comfortably past the fish, you will drag your lure towards the feeding stripies and hopefully be rewarded with a hook-up.

Rapala X-Rap Magnum 30 XRMAG30

All the life-like scale detail, selections from the incredible patterns of the original X-Rap plus a massive deep-diving lip equal a 30 foot "unassisted" trolling lure that can be run up to 13 knots for big game

WXTide32 - a free Windows tide and current prediction program.

• Predicts tides from 1970 through 2037.
• More than 9,500 stations worldwide (list) with 160 in England, Ireland and Scotland.
• More than 300 tidal current stations, all in North America.
• User station manager to easily add custom tide and current subordinate stations.
• Text outputs: daily tide list, monthly calendar, incremental tide.
• Graphic modes: tide clock, realtime graph, scrolling graph, overview.
• Each graphic mode has separate display options and window settings.
• Supports legacy ASCII text and new binary TCD harmonic constituent files.
• Supports user-installed World Vector Shoreline (WVS) map files.
• Can play user-installed ship's bells sound files on the half hour.
• Designed for interactive use but can also be used from other programs.
• Generates BMP graphics and text tide CSV spreadsheet files.
• Worldwide timezones, solar/lunar events, recent stations, realtime tide state icon.
• Low resource usage typically 4 MB disk, 5 MB RAM active, 1 MB as icon.
• Tested on Windows 9x, NT4, 2000, ME, XP.
• Self-contained, nothing else needed.
• Context sensitive help and all "C" source code included.

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Baldchin Groper / Bayam

MANY anglers agree that baldies, as they are frequently referred to with affection, are one of the best eating fish in the sea. They would be in most anglers’ top five table fish, and justifiably so. Baldies are commonly found in coral and reef strewn shallows where they have developed a great ability to break fishing line in a couple of seconds, frequently before an angler has time to put the brakes on.

Identification
With their white and scaleless “bald” white chin, bigger baldchin groper are not too hard to distinguish, but in the north of WA juveniles may be confused with paler versions of the black-spot tusk fish. However, as its name suggests the black-spot tusk fish does have a black spot at the base of the middle of its dorsal fin. Another fish with a white “bald” chin in our northern waters is the blue tusk fish. Although similar in body shape and colour to the genuine baldie, the blue tusk fish has a white spot in the middle of its back and the tail carries a scribble marked pattern, whereas the baldie’s tail has no markings..

Fishing methods
Look for shallow water, up to five metres deep, which contains some coral lumps and a mixture of broken coral and sand. Explore the area at the back of the boat by casting into likely looking gutters and channels. If baldies are there they generally don’t take long to put in an appearance but if the fish are small I tend to move on and try to find bigger fish.

Giant Trevally

Scientific Name: Caranx ignobilis

Identification
Adult GTs are generally easy to identify but juveniles up to three or four kilos are a bit more challenging, given that there are just so many different trevallies in the ocean. The bigeye is probably most frequently confused with the GT but it has a much bigger eye, as its name suggests. The GT also has a steep forehead profile.

Tackle and bait
Anglers targeting GTs generally either troll or cast lures. Trolling outfits should be selected to suit the size of the biggest GT you're likely to encounter in the waters you're fishing. And whereas 10kg may be fine in deep, "friendly" trolling country, 24kg may not be heavy enough in shallow, bommie-strewn territory.

Fishing methods
The type of country that might hold some jumbo tailor down south is likely to turn up a GT up north. White water washing over the top of a lump, with shallow broken country all around, just screams GTs, and it's here that poppers really come into their own. The last thing you want to do in this sort of country is to cast out a lure and have it sink, or dive, into the reef and coral. So a floating popper is the obvious practical choice. Of the different types of poppers around these days, the three that have worked best for me over the years are the cup?faced wooden ones which skip and slurp all the way back to the rod tip. Varying retrieve rates are integral to this style of fishing.

The clear resin poppers such as Hawaiian pillie poppers or local Redbacks are best fished with variation in rod tip height and retrieve rates. I have had some really good sessions on these types of lures. Probably the most internationally popular popper style for GTs is the blooper. This bulbous, cup-faced popper is twitched, stop-start fashion, and frequently GTs will hit it as it sits motionless on the surface. The larger bloopers can really benefit from a savage downward rod tip action to "bloop" the bigger fish into your area. This is great fun, but don't forget to crush down the barbs to save both you and the fish from excessive damage. Some anglers target big GTs by trolling rigged mullet or garfish baits around dropoffs. Very slow trolling or mooching as 1 tend to call it with large weighted swimming baits can produce GTs, and also a very welcome bycatch of big mackerel.