Fishing for food

Part of my plan while living in the motor home was to supplement my food supplies with freshly caught fish, it’s taken me a month to get my act together and actually go fishing, but what a beautiful place it was to fish.

This is the east end of Mazzoletti’s beach and I’ve been coming to this spot to fish for probably 30 years or more with mixed results in the fishing stakes, but it’s always a pleasant place to be.

This is also just a stones throw away from possibly the most popular beach in the Denmark area. If you have visited Denmark in the south of W.A. then chances are you have visited greens pool at some stage while you were here. It’s one of the most photographed places on the south coast and rightfully so as it’s one of the most beautiful scenic sections of coast line you can imagine. With it’s white sand beaches, green blue ocean and large granite outcrops, it’s extremely photogenic coastline and I’ll post up a gallery of pictures from around the area soon.

But back to the fishing, the place where I fished yesterday is called Mazzoletti’s beach and there are a few different ways to get there. You can walk along the beach from greens pool, walk the back way on a 500m bush track when you park just off the greens pool road, or you can walk/4×4 the almost 9km of beach from parry’s beach to the west.

I’ve marked the fishing spot with a blue cross and you can see the track I walked down off the William bay rd. Unfortunately the section of beach along greens pool to the right of where I was is pretty well fished out, you have to walk to somewhere like Mazzoletti’s to catch anything. The best way to start at Mazzoletti’s is to stand on the top of the dunes and look for good deep gutters and structures in the water. Along the beach here I could see many deep gutters and holes that were reasonably close to the shore, so I made a mental note of these and headed along the beach casting some different lures, metal slices, soft plastics and hard bodies, I tossed lots of them and got no interest at all. Looked like I was going to have another unsuccessful day fishing, reminding me of fishing back in Perth. This area can turn up all sorts of different fish, my main focus has been the Australian Salmon and I’ve caught dozens of them off this beach over the years. The salmon run on the south coast here is pretty famous among locals, it’s the best chance for people to catch big fish in waters where normally you might only get smaller stuff, but this wasn’t salmon season, the salmon are here over the winter months.

I wandered back onto the rocks and pried off a limpet for some bait, I changed my rig to a sinker and a couple of hooks, one small and one larger, then began throwing this around. I tried out deep off some rocks and numerous deep gutters and holes along the beach, still no luck at all. Something drew me to this small group of rocks that were only about 4 metres from the shore in the centre of the picture above, there was a deep hole around the rocks and it was at the end of a gutter running close to the shore. A cast into this little hole got immediate bites and I landed a reasonable size sand whiting. Yay, fish…   So I was off, the limpet made great bait as it’s so tough it stayed on my hook really well and caught fish after fish, though I did swap to use some of the freshly caught fish for bait after a while. It was tricky fishing as the hole here in front of the rock is tiny, so casts had to be fairly accurate yet this seemed to be the only place the fish were.

All of these fish came from the tiny little hole in front of that rock, plus I also caught a small flathead an angel fish and a few smaller herring  and more small whiting which I threw back. So a haul of over a dozen sand whiting, a silver bream and a herring, not bad for an afternoon at the beach. The smaller whiting and the herring will be saved as bait for my next fishing trip, whiting makes excellent bait here on the south coast. The whiting on the plate and silver bream will be filleted for dinner and their carcasses will be saved for blow fly maggot production, for further herring/gardie bait in the future.

The lesson I drew from today? Never discount any spot when you’re fishing, try everywhere. This tiny little hole that must have only been about 5m long by 3m wide, produced a swag of fish, when the gutter a few metres to the side didn’t get a bite, and they were still biting when I left.