Fishing: Thinking outside the square

Anglers who experiment with different ideas will often catch the most fish and open doors to new techniques.

If traditional seafishing methods such as bottom baits are ignored by snapper, a switch to flasher rigs, jigs or soft-plastics may trigger action.

If trout ignore nymphs on a floating line with long trace, a globug or nymph drifted along the bottom on a sinking line with short trace may make all the difference.

In the old days berley was a foreign word, until someone decided to try to attract fish to the boat by dropping an onion bag full of meaty-oily gunge to the seabed. Today no boatie would leave home without the berley bag.

A smelt fly ignored on an erratic retrieve will often be taken on a dead drift under a strike-indicator, hence the recent arrival of the Bleeding Smelt, which hangs in the water with a red tag, as if injured by trout attacking the smelt school by butting through it at force and returning at their leisure to eat the injured.

John Moran, the Manukau man and a troutfisher from way back, has been trying new ideas all his life and adapts freshwater techniques to his Manukau Harbour excursions with remarkable success.

"I don't like the normal - I like to think outside the square," he says.

He recalls one late summer when he was fishing in 4m on the edge of the Little Muddy Creek channel, which was clearing after downpours had drenched the Waitakeres and flushed down to the lower Nihotupu dam and thence down the creek to the harbour.

Using conventional methods, he caught a fat 4kg (91b) trevally and, as troutfishers often do, gutted it to find what it had been eating. The stomach cavity was bulging with crickets.

He started using the crickets as bait and soon had close to 20 trevally and several gurnard in the boat. He was using a soft-tip rod, super-thin line with a swivel, 4.5kg fluorocarbon trace, size 2/0 hooks and a half-ounce sinker. He would cast upstream into the current at the edge of the channel and let it drift down past him, as troutfishers do when nymph fishing.

He won't forget that day; nor will his son, John jnr, forget the day he used a green rubber lizard from his child's toybox as bait at the mouth of the Clevedon River in Kawakawa Bay. His first fish there was a snapper of about 8kg (18lb), and he caught several other big ones.

My nephew, Trevor Clark of Southland, fishing in the Kerikeri Inlet at the mouth of the river after storms, set up his fly rod and drifted a Tongariro nymph called the Bug-eye (tied with a fuzzy peacock herl body and silvery ball-bearing eyes cut from a bathroom plug chain), into the berley trail behind the boat. His first snapper was 9kg (20lb) and he landed two more close to that weight.

On another occasion John Moran had caught a gurnard full of baby flounder when fishing the edge of a Manukau sandbank channel. He cut baby flounder shapes out of a piece of thin black roofing rubber, inserted hooks, and made a killing using a fly rod and sinking line. "Any thin rubber will do, like a piece of car tyre tube."

Moran is also a big fan of a highly successful and long-established trout fly called the Mrs Simpson, which represents a cockabully, and he uses it also to catch gurnard on a fly rod. "When the'bullies are about, it's a killer, that Mrs Simpson."

He also thinks well outside the square and into cans of corn and peas, which he has used very successfully to catch flounder with the individual kernels threaded on small hooks.

"Places like Little Muddy Creek pour a lot of insect life into the harbour after heavy rains, and the fish can be targeted with a variety of insect imitations," says Moran.

His comments apply not just to Little Muddy Creek or the Kerikeri river mouth. They apply to any creek that washes insect life into the sea after storms. The best time is when the murky floodwater is clearing.

So give it a go. You need to be a good keen man with a mind like Moran's.