catching live bait

[Az]

seahorse, I have been following your posts in your quest to fish offshore, if you will be heading out of the seaway you shouldn't have too much trouble locating some bait schools, have a rod setup already with the bait jig attached and snapper lead on the bottom, look for 'clouds' of bait on the sounder, will appear like big black blobs if not using a colour sounder, once your on top of it you want to try and hold the boat in position and have a deckie drop the jig down to the visinity of where the bait is - tell him/her what level there're at, more often than not you can straight right on the bottom and work your way up, gentle occasionly jigs at varying heights and you should start feeling the rod load up, give it some time down there to load the hooks up and bring to the surface slow but steady. I find the plain wilson jigs have worked best for us.

It can pay to have another rod setup too and whack a livey out the otherside while your collecting more bait as your a chance of picking up cobia or some tuna hanging around the bait schools, a dirty mack tuna can come in handy here as they will make for an awesome strip bait on the reefs for snapper, parrot and whatever else may be around!

[Seahorse]

thanks heaps az. Yes it is a quest and would like as much in place as i can. All the info on here has been great, and everyone freely gives it.
Thanks all.


cheers
greg

[born2fly]

All really good advice given in this thread, one of the most usefull I have seen

[R_K_HILL]

Yet.. I went up the pine tonight and caught only 3 puddies in about 20 casts and about 200 Biddies. They were a bit shy tonight..