GEAR USED: I was using a Shimano Squidgies Long Cast 7'9" rod matched up to a Vanford 2500 reel spooled with 6 pound Kairiki braid that was connected to a one metre-long leader of 8 pound Ocea FC fluorocarbon. If you love this video and the channel, please consider shouting me a beer (or a coffee!) to help him produce lots MORE great RUclips content for your viewing pleasure! Simply go to: www.buymeacoffee.com/starlo Thanks... and cheers!
Changing the treble to some little assist hooks can help with the hook up rate on bream. Particularly with cicada lures that face backwards like the siglets.
Grew up chasing bass and cod in the rivers around New England with my uncle and grandfather. Will never forget the first trip on the Macleay River. Endless amounts off bass being caught all on litterbugs. Cemented my love for freshwater river fishing. Stunning scenery and ecosystems. The fish were just a bonus. Still to this day the river is where I go to reset and unwind. Amazing video Starlo. Cheers
Saw a vid a couple of days ago and guy was cleaning a couple of snapper which had bellies full of cicadas - that would certainly be a surprising catch on one of those lures!
Thanks Starlo! im goign to AFT's comp this sunday, and Ive been hearing cicadas most days the last week, so I''ve been thinking ill match the hatch and use mainly cicadas on mangroves come comp day.
My god, some of those snag piles are stunning, absolutely mouth watering! What a beautiful system to have to yourself! I have family in Batemans. I think a Summer visit is in order! I fished for Bass and EPs on bream gear the other week. I had exact same inner dialogue as i felt the leader rubbing on timber, "you idiot. Why are you fishing with bream gear...!" 😂
Fantastic fish from an exciting style of fishing Starlo, cant wait to get out on the river again soon. 50cm wild river bass is a once in a lifetime fish for many of us, well done.
Great vid mate, got to love a cicada session on the bass 👌🏽. I've only ever caught the fantail bass in the shoalhaven, which is my local, so I'm very surprised to see them in a different system... it would be very interesting to know just what systems they inhabit and if it's just the nsw south coast systems or further spread.
Good onya starlo, now i have to go bass fishing tomorrow, top fish mate its like that in the maclay river at times, fish everywere, keep up the great work
Fabulous Steve you can’t beat this type of fishing it’s such it’s so exciting and fun ! What a place to the fishing almost seems secondary it’s so beautiful just being there is a treat . Some Cracking fish mate well done 👍
Awesome session for sure! 👍👍👍 Pity we haven’t got Bass here in WA, I could think of a spot or two they would do very well. A tip for you with the fishing window around midday into afternoon in rivers, particularly here in Oz where there’s any north south trajectory, is that as the sun crosses, you can be fishing one side of the river successfully in the morning up to just after midday & suddenly it goes quiet & you can’t figure out why? Often as the sun moves overhead towards the west of an afternoon the fish will swim across the river to the opposite side, to be under the shade. They learn pretty quick growing up that once the sun shines into the water they are vulnerable to predation by king fishers birds in the trees overhead, so they swap sides to be safe in the shade on the opposite bank. It’s something tripped me up a lot in my early days. Eventually I figured it out, but was embarrassed how long it took me to work it out. Cicada lures is a whole new idea. I reckon it probably couldn’t hurt to come up with a green biting March fly lure Steve, as I have witnessed black bream gulping down a string of them before today. Stinking hot, wasn’t catching anything so tied up under the only overhanging tree for some much needed relief in the shade to eat lunch. And the March flies were out in swarms & soon started biting the trap out of me, so I spat the dummy and started smacking as many as I could and tossing them over the side into the current. Then I noticed a small school of black bream holding in the current sipping them down as gentle as trout sipping spent spinners, one after another. As fast as I’d kill the March flies they would sip them down. Yet it was during a window of “non activity” where seemingly I couldn’t buy a fish & the fish market, but those big green March flies were irresistible to the Black Bream. Dammit I didn’t have even one dry fly in my box that looked anything like a March fly. Might be something your lad could develop & sell perhaps. 👍 Keep up the great work.
Some great thoughts there! I’ve done the exact same thing with March flies on jungle perch up in north QLD. They particularly fancy them “wounded” and buzzing in circles on the surface! 😉
I live on the might Manning, been here on and off my entire life, but still haven't really cracked the code on the big local bass.. Next year i might make a real push to get a trophy fish out of the upper reaches, but until then the dream continues lol
@@StarloGetsReel I'm blessed to have a friend circle of gun locals that seem to drag 50cm bass for fun. I'll have to put the sos out next season when i'm not so time poor! Until then I'll continue to live vicariously lol
I learned the "trick" of leaving a lure to sit and jiggle by sheer accident about 100 years ago. Brand new Bait caster, 3/8oz Jointed Jitterbug and a birds nest from Hell. I was on the verge of successfully rectifying the knotted mess when a substantial Bass blitzed the lure and finished the job for me 😁I spent the remainder of my weekend doing the sit and jiggle on every first cast to a new piece of structure.
Love it! Saw my mate Gaz do exactly the same thing years ago up on the Clarence. I reckon he spent a full 5 minutes unpicking the backlash from hell, and the moment the lure moved after that loooooong sit... KABOOM! Still his PB bass to this day.
No doubt. Super long pauses work. I've heard several of those anecdotes. One bloke was casting surface at night when his wife called. Many seconds later , he gets a big hookup. After hearing this story I did a similar thing. A 30 second pause on surface and a BIG Sooty Grunter smashed it. Kinchant Dam😊
Cheers! I tend to work on the principle of “don’t ask, don’t tell” with smaller bass waters. Fact is there are a hundred rivers or more where you can go this stuff. It’s more about the technique than the location. 👍
@ like I said, any coastal river between Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria and Maryborough in Queensland holds Australian bass. Hundreds of choices. I’d really rather not be spoon feeding exact locations to the world when there’s no need to do so. Sad fact of life is it’s not just you and your son who are reading this, if you get my drift. 😉 Dig out some maps (or Google Earth) and go exploring. It’s much more rewarding that way, too. Tight Lines. 👍
No. It’s obviously a genetic thing, which I’d always assumed to be more likely to be observed in hatchery-bred bass, but clearly it also occurs in “wild” populations. If you look closely you’ll see that ALL the fins on that particular fish (not just the tail) were over-sized or over-developed, so something in its genetic coding must result in exaggerated fin development. Fascinating stuff. 👍
@StarloGetsReel shellharbour is normally I've noticed when I googled "fantail australian bass" but I have caught a few in around kyogle creeks and river
This is why i don't like using real light gear even though it works best, ya lure is gone and now theres a fish with a lure hanging out or swallowed and won't survive and have a slow death
@StarloGetsReel no i know and i know thats what gets the adrenaline going lol, but yeah ive seen it happen to many times and i don't know that many people and yea ive been smoked happens to us all, i remember all the experts say the just rusts, its not true, i got a long tim once and it was all haemorrhage, had 3 2/0 heavy gauge gang hooks inside with what looked like 12lb leader🙄, also alot don't have good terminal knots especially braid, granny knot, just dont cut it 🤦
why do you use gear so light that if you hook a 50cm bass you are so worried about landing it? shouldn't your gear be set up to handle the biggest fish possible to catch?
I started that session targeting bream, which is why I was using bream-weight gear. Choosing gear suited to the biggest fish in the system (mulloway of well over a metre in that estuary) would dramatically reduce the number of fish hooked and make it very difficult to cast the small, lightweight cicada-pattern lures I was using. The application of “finesse” to fishing almost always increases the number of fish hooked.. that’s just a fact of life. The balancing act lies in choosing gear that doesn’t result in too many of those fish being lost. In this session I got lucky and was able to extract the fish I hooked on gear that was admittedly a bit too light for the task at hand. Had I been busted up by any of the fish I hooked, I’d definitely have upgraded my leader strength or even switched to the heavier baitcaster outfit I had on board. 👍
@StarloGetsReel nice! my theory is 6lb braid isn't much different to 10 or 12lb braid and leader doesn't matter so much on surface lures so may as well use 12lb leader right? then you'll have a way higher chance at stopping the big bream or bass
I used to fish that river in my canoe in the mid to late 80s when my in-laws were living at Shoalhaven heads, got my biggest river bass there 53cm to the fork, I also remember passing you bushy in your canoe, I think you guys were getting a few pics for a write up in one the fishing mags back then not sure which one it was.
GEAR USED: I was using a Shimano Squidgies Long Cast 7'9" rod matched up to a Vanford 2500 reel spooled with 6 pound Kairiki braid that was connected to a one metre-long leader of 8 pound Ocea FC fluorocarbon.
If you love this video and the channel, please consider shouting me a beer (or a coffee!) to help him produce lots MORE great RUclips content for your viewing pleasure! Simply go to: www.buymeacoffee.com/starlo
Thanks... and cheers!
Wonderful! Thanks Steve - really enjoyed that. Bass time!!
Cheers! Glad you liked it. 👍
Great vid. Loved the bird life and the serenity. Beautiful place. 10 out of 10
Cheers, glad you enjoyed it! 👍
Changing the treble to some little assist hooks can help with the hook up rate on bream. Particularly with cicada lures that face backwards like the siglets.
Yep. 👍
Grew up chasing bass and cod in the rivers around New England with my uncle and grandfather. Will never forget the first trip on the Macleay River. Endless amounts off bass being caught all on litterbugs. Cemented my love for freshwater river fishing. Stunning scenery and ecosystems. The fish were just a bonus. Still to this day the river is where I go to reset and unwind. Amazing video Starlo. Cheers
@@cayne1 cheers! 👍
Saw a vid a couple of days ago and guy was cleaning a couple of snapper which had bellies full of cicadas - that would certainly be a surprising catch on one of those lures!
Wow! That’s amazing!
I found it, is in Sydney I think
Thanks Starlo! im goign to AFT's comp this sunday, and Ive been hearing cicadas most days the last week, so I''ve been thinking ill match the hatch and use mainly cicadas on mangroves come comp day.
Sounds like a great plan! Good luck!
My god, some of those snag piles are stunning, absolutely mouth watering! What a beautiful system to have to yourself!
I have family in Batemans. I think a Summer visit is in order!
I fished for Bass and EPs on bream gear the other week. I had exact same inner dialogue as i felt the leader rubbing on timber, "you idiot. Why are you fishing with bream gear...!" 😂
@@JimmyFlicksFishing love it! 🤣
Thanks
Thank YOU! 👍👍👍
Awsome content mate, keep up the magnificent fishing 🎣 videos 📹 👏 👍 👌 😉🎣🎣🎣
That's some proper finesse work there, Starlo. Magic stuff.
Cheers! 👍
Great video Steve 👍thanks mate 🎣
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.
Hearing those cicadas is a calling sign for bass .
Yup.
Fantastic fish from an exciting style of fishing Starlo, cant wait to get out on the river again soon. 50cm wild river bass is a once in a lifetime fish for many of us, well done.
@@Seids_89 glad you enjoyed it!
The serenity is amazing, I need to find somewhere like this in Victoria to take my kayak.
Plenty of spots. Try Gippsland region. 👍
Great vid mate, got to love a cicada session on the bass 👌🏽.
I've only ever caught the fantail bass in the shoalhaven, which is my local, so I'm very surprised to see them in a different system... it would be very interesting to know just what systems they inhabit and if it's just the nsw south coast systems or further spread.
For sure. 👍 Yes, I was surprised to get a fantail.
Good onya starlo, now i have to go bass fishing tomorrow, top fish mate its like that in the maclay river at times, fish everywere, keep up the great work
Ha! Love it! Good luck with the fishing mate! 👍
That same trick works very well with small stick baits. It's my favourite technique for big bream.
For sure. 👍
This is my local river and I didn’t know there was fish of this quality in the river, inspired once again to get on the water
Good to hear!
I like your casting accuracy with the eggbeater.
Who needs a baitcaster. 😂
@@redtobertshateshandles thanks! I love a baitcaster but with those lighter and more air-resistant lures, it’s hard to top an eggbeater. 👍
Fabulous Steve you can’t beat this type of fishing it’s such it’s so exciting and fun ! What a place to the fishing almost seems secondary it’s so beautiful just being there is a treat . Some Cracking fish mate well done 👍
Absolutely!
Awesome session for sure! 👍👍👍
Pity we haven’t got Bass here in WA, I could think of a spot or two they would do very well.
A tip for you with the fishing window around midday into afternoon in rivers, particularly here in Oz where there’s any north south trajectory, is that as the sun crosses, you can be fishing one side of the river successfully in the morning up to just after midday & suddenly it goes quiet & you can’t figure out why?
Often as the sun moves overhead towards the west of an afternoon the fish will swim across the river to the opposite side, to be under the shade.
They learn pretty quick growing up that once the sun shines into the water they are vulnerable to predation by king fishers birds in the trees overhead, so they swap sides to be safe in the shade on the opposite bank.
It’s something tripped me up a lot in my early days. Eventually I figured it out, but was embarrassed how long it took me to work it out.
Cicada lures is a whole new idea.
I reckon it probably couldn’t hurt to come up with a green biting March fly lure Steve, as I have witnessed black bream gulping down a string of them before today.
Stinking hot, wasn’t catching anything so tied up under the only overhanging tree for some much needed relief in the shade to eat lunch.
And the March flies were out in swarms & soon started biting the trap out of me, so I spat the dummy and started smacking as many as I could and tossing them over the side into the current.
Then I noticed a small school of black bream holding in the current sipping them down as gentle as trout sipping spent spinners, one after another.
As fast as I’d kill the March flies they would sip them down.
Yet it was during a window of “non activity” where seemingly I couldn’t buy a fish & the fish market, but those big green March flies were irresistible to the Black Bream.
Dammit I didn’t have even one dry fly in my box that looked anything like a March fly.
Might be something your lad could develop & sell perhaps. 👍
Keep up the great work.
Some great thoughts there! I’ve done the exact same thing with March flies on jungle perch up in north QLD. They particularly fancy them “wounded” and buzzing in circles on the surface! 😉
Great entertaining video. Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great episode Starlo 😊
Thanks! 👍
I live on the might Manning, been here on and off my entire life, but still haven't really cracked the code on the big local bass..
Next year i might make a real push to get a trophy fish out of the upper reaches, but until then the dream continues lol
Seems to fish well really early in the season up there: September to about November. Good luck!
@@StarloGetsReel I'm blessed to have a friend circle of gun locals that seem to drag 50cm bass for fun. I'll have to put the sos out next season when i'm not so time poor!
Until then I'll continue to live vicariously lol
Nice one Starlo 👍
@@aussiecoinwhisperer8307 cheers!
Epic bass Steve! :)
Cheers mate… I need to chuck a few of your great cicada flies next. 👍
I learned the "trick" of leaving a lure to sit and jiggle by sheer accident about 100 years ago. Brand new Bait caster, 3/8oz Jointed Jitterbug and a birds nest from Hell. I was on the verge of successfully rectifying the knotted mess when a substantial Bass blitzed the lure and finished the job for me 😁I spent the remainder of my weekend doing the sit and jiggle on every first cast to a new piece of structure.
Love it! Saw my mate Gaz do exactly the same thing years ago up on the Clarence. I reckon he spent a full 5 minutes unpicking the backlash from hell, and the moment the lure moved after that loooooong sit... KABOOM! Still his PB bass to this day.
Great vid Steve. That was a monster of a bass, well done
No doubt. Super long pauses work.
I've heard several of those anecdotes. One bloke was casting surface at night when his wife called. Many seconds later , he gets a big hookup.
After hearing this story I did a similar thing. A 30 second pause on surface and a BIG Sooty Grunter smashed it. Kinchant Dam😊
Wow they’re huge mate. Those cicada lures work! Any scent on them? The only thing I might add is I don’t like price. They’re quite dear
Yes, they’re not especially cheap lures, although not as expensive as some. 👍
Great video Steve, Moruya ?
Cheers! I tend to work on the principle of “don’t ask, don’t tell” with smaller bass waters. Fact is there are a hundred rivers or more where you can go this stuff. It’s more about the technique than the location. 👍
@ just looking for advise especially for my son and he’s mates to go explore, guess I won’t ask then.
@ like I said, any coastal river between Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria and Maryborough in Queensland holds Australian bass. Hundreds of choices. I’d really rather not be spoon feeding exact locations to the world when there’s no need to do so. Sad fact of life is it’s not just you and your son who are reading this, if you get my drift. 😉 Dig out some maps (or Google Earth) and go exploring. It’s much more rewarding that way, too. Tight Lines. 👍
Ever seen bream attacking leaves that have blown onto the water?...Could be the next big thing!
@@truthbetold2012 I’ll “leaf” that to you. 🤣
@@StarloGetsReel Haha Could be tough to throw accurately!...I've seen them smashing leaves on those super windy days EPs to.
Hey starlo, just an afternoon thought, what brand of cicada where you using
I’ll have to have a look. Not 100% sure!
Looks like a siglett or the atomics which are a copy but not if the same quality
@ Siglett I reckon.
I've caught few fan tail bass starlo do you know what makes them have a fan tail
No. It’s obviously a genetic thing, which I’d always assumed to be more likely to be observed in hatchery-bred bass, but clearly it also occurs in “wild” populations. If you look closely you’ll see that ALL the fins on that particular fish (not just the tail) were over-sized or over-developed, so something in its genetic coding must result in exaggerated fin development. Fascinating stuff. 👍
@StarloGetsReel shellharbour is normally I've noticed when I googled "fantail australian bass" but I have caught a few in around kyogle creeks and river
Dose he crush the barbs to protect the Bass's Mouth.
Hope SO.
@@kimyoung4554 no he doesn’t. Barbs on modern trebles are tiny and bass are tough. 😉
See your gone to a foot control how’s that working out for you ?
I’m thinking of doing the same, is it wireless?
Great bass you got down your way.
Actually I hate the foot control! Batteries went flat in the remote I usually wear around my neck.
This is why i don't like using real light gear even though it works best, ya lure is gone and now theres a fish with a lure hanging out or swallowed and won't survive and have a slow death
@@mezame1626 you’re right that it doesn’t make sense to go TOO light… but I didn’t lose any.
@StarloGetsReel no i know and i know thats what gets the adrenaline going lol, but yeah ive seen it happen to many times and i don't know that many people and yea ive been smoked happens to us all, i remember all the experts say the just rusts, its not true, i got a long tim once and it was all haemorrhage, had 3 2/0 heavy gauge gang hooks inside with what looked like 12lb leader🙄, also alot don't have good terminal knots especially braid, granny knot, just dont cut it 🤦
why do you use gear so light that if you hook a 50cm bass you are so worried about landing it? shouldn't your gear be set up to handle the biggest fish possible to catch?
I started that session targeting bream, which is why I was using bream-weight gear. Choosing gear suited to the biggest fish in the system (mulloway of well over a metre in that estuary) would dramatically reduce the number of fish hooked and make it very difficult to cast the small, lightweight cicada-pattern lures I was using. The application of “finesse” to fishing almost always increases the number of fish hooked.. that’s just a fact of life. The balancing act lies in choosing gear that doesn’t result in too many of those fish being lost. In this session I got lucky and was able to extract the fish I hooked on gear that was admittedly a bit too light for the task at hand. Had I been busted up by any of the fish I hooked, I’d definitely have upgraded my leader strength or even switched to the heavier baitcaster outfit I had on board. 👍
@StarloGetsReel nice! my theory is 6lb braid isn't much different to 10 or 12lb braid and leader doesn't matter so much on surface lures so may as well use 12lb leader right? then you'll have a way higher chance at stopping the big bream or bass
@ yep that’s about right too. 👍
Although casting is definitely easier (and longer) with the thinner braid.
Early bird gets the worm, what a way to start a Tuesday morning, on ya legend 🫡🔥🔥
Thanks mate! 👍
I used to fish that river in my canoe in the mid to late 80s when my in-laws were living at Shoalhaven heads, got my biggest river bass there 53cm to the fork, I also remember passing you bushy in your canoe, I think you guys were getting a few pics for a write up in one the fishing mags back then not sure which one it was.