Friday, February 24, 2006 

Hooks used by division one

A lot of people wonder what hooks are used by the top specialists in competitions like the Surfcasting World Cup and the top European Surfcasting leagues.

This is of course a hard question, but the best probable answer is that top fisherman use the best hooks from each one of his own sponsor brand provides. And this answer of course, doesn't help you much.

Like in every sport there are also some trends that come and go that are launched by top experts that later everyone tends to copy. There is also some rules of thumb that everyone can apply to almost any brand on the market.

- Hooks with ring eye are better than others in surfaces - Why? Because worms slide better from needle to hook and then to line through the ring rather than the knot tie on other hooks. This addresses better baiting and better bait presentation. Also, during competition making a Palomar knot is faster than making any other knot, specially under rough conditions. Time matters.

- Use hooks of the color that matches better the bait. - White hooks for sardine, black hooks for worms, flat fish tend to be attracted by red. We want to disguise well the hook if needed, we want to use attractor properties if needed.

- Long shank hooks are better for fish with sharp teeth, thus diminishing the number of possible losses.

This year my rigs will be based on Sasame Wormer and Gamakatsu F31 brand hooks. The first are awesome hooks used by most fisherman of Division One and the latter is also very good having longer shanks and should be used accordingly.

5:08 PM | |

Thursday, February 23, 2006 

New bait on the block

Two new fishing baits are coming soon to our market probably during March. I know this because during the past months, I’ve been one of the few selected to test them along other fisherman and the Board of Portuguese Fishing Federation.

The idea of the producer (www.iscovivo.com) was to make them official bait for the current season and get some sponsoring from top fisherman. Turns out that they will only get sponsoring for now since the bait needs wider distribution through all territory in a way that every sportsman is able to test and train enough time with it before competing.

The bait I’m talking will be labeled as "Gigante Arco-Iris" (Rainbow Giant) and Brandling, both original of the southern hemisphere but in this case produced in Europe in a protected environment resembling their habitat. They look like the usual earth worms we're used to seeing in river competition fishing but they are not geophage as the previous. The R.G. worm can grow up to 25cm which is alot and is projected for sea fishing.

The Brandling is going to be marketed as a river bait used to catch bass, carp and others.
One of the good properties of this bait, come from its easy storage properties, not needing cold thus leaving us the option for almost every possible storage place. Also, they come in a nice package with the necessary food for surviving long time, the producer guarantees 20 days... but our tests showed time beyond that period.
I left a box on purpose in my car trunk (checking everyday) under very hot temperatures and after 7 days, the bait was still fine.



The bait resisted enough to the most powerful casts (used ground cast, not pendullum) and survival on cold water was averaging the 30min. time, which is more than enough for competition where any rig only averages 10min. on water. The worm was baited through the ring they have below the head (used for reproduction) and i didn’t need a needle for the baiting process, even though I think it's advisable. My personal sessions using the worm included catching sea bass, mullet and white sea bream, all using the surfcasting technique.

I hope that these worms can fill a gap in the market with its versatile use and durability. All in all, it can only increase the choices for the fisherman.

3:06 PM | |

Friday, February 17, 2006 

Excellent surfcasting books

Portuguese fisherman use to say that you don't learn how to fish by reading books. I think its an obviously true statement but I also believe that books can be an awesome shortcut and help when it comes to bending that hard learning curve, specially if you can't get enough outdoor time. After all, if the books are good your getting someone elses resumed experience.


My professional engineering background tells me that books and the internet, as complement to field experiment works very well on any science discipline and of course the same formula must apply to competition fishing. When it comes to pick a good reading, that's a different story. To be honest, I rarely find anything that is more valuable reading than the same time spent on fishing.

Surfcasting books are rare, good surfcasting books even harder to find and to be able to have them usually it takes learning some languages, English, French and Italian.

Inside the few gems that the student surfcaster should get is the works of Frenchman Denis Mourizard (www.denismourizard.com).
Denis books are written in French and usually available thru www.fnac.fr , they include a hard cover book on all aspects of Surfcasting (Le Surfcasting), a lure fishing guide to Sea Bass (Pêche du bar aux leurres), a pocket book about rigs (60 montages de Surfcasting) and a pocket book on knots (40 noeuds et astuces). All these books are worth the time and a must if you don't know where to start.

12:15 PM | |

Monday, February 13, 2006 

Fly fishing patterns for portuguese trout

Some days ago some foreigner was asking in Planetapesca fishing portal about Fly fishing patterns for portuguese trout. Maybe because he was thinking about coming here on vacation, maybe to prepare the upcoming world fishing games also here later this year.

Anyway, i thought i should post what my friend José Rodrigues (Webmaster of www.segredosdapluma.com and flyfishing expert) said. We should play the good host and help whoever comes here.


"The flies are the traditional flies. You can use gold bead nymphs in 12, 14 hook, cadis flies in 14, 16 hooks, little beattis.

CDC flies are great too. We don't have a specific fly that is really more efective than other ones, so you can use what you want. BUT... don't think that the portuguese trout are stupid.... most of the time you need to use little flies in 16 or 20 hooks, and 0,10mm tippet....

I don't have pics for you, but in my web site vou can see one or two good flies. Thanks José".

3:47 PM | |

Sunday, February 12, 2006 

Rods to look for in 2006

Every year new rods are coming to the market, this year is not different and while some are just old models with a new skin, others prove to be fresh air on the stores.

My current picks for the year are the Shimano Power Aero XTR Surf, don’t make a confusion with the Power Aero Twin Tip and the other is the Colmic Advanced Surf. Reasons behind this is because both are hybrid rods, using a carbon blank with a fiberglass tip much needed for the sensitive bites of the temperate Atlantic surfcasting competition. We want them casting like a catapult and sensitive like a feather.

Before this rods came to the market, first division Portuguese surfcaster fishermen been trying to emulate what Spanish top fishermen already been doing with rods over the past decades - this is getting top quality carbon blanks and sawing the third piece and enchase a fiberglass tip on it. Of course this process has to be very well done, because you don’t want to destroy an expensive blank and also a bad enchase can rupture on the worse possible moments.


My personal attempt on producing a rod that would perform such these ones, without the hard to swallow sawing process was to buy an Beastmaster Surf S.T.C. (Surf travel rod, very rigid and done in 7 pieces) and make a fiberglass replica of the seventh piece. I achieved a wonderful result and that rod doubled it's value in performance. The price? a few bucks.

5:19 PM | |

Wednesday, February 08, 2006 

Webmaster of...

i thought someone might be interested to know that i am the webmaster of the World Fishing Games 2006 ( PortugalFishing2006 ) the Portuguese Fishing Federation ( F.P.P.D. ) and the fishing portal Planetapesca ( Planetapesca.com ).
Always open to suggestions and to improve any of my current projects.

10:02 PM | |

Monday, February 06, 2006 

Rig resistance to power cast, a tip from José Afonso

One of my main problems when trying to cast far thus using a power cast technique, is that my rigs tend to break at blast off. That happened right on my first try past Saturday fishing with José Afonso.

After looking through my rigs, J.A. told me that my stop knots were not good for long cast. They "choke" the mother line with great stress and would break easy. He showed me then the right way to stop the crossbeads on the competition rig.
Here's both situations;


5:53 PM | |

 

Training session with José Afonso

I wanted to train in Consolação beach, in Peniche (Portugal), for the upcoming season of the 2nd. division regionals of Portuguese Surfcasting league, so when José Afonso agreed on this fishing training with me I couldn’t believe how lucky i was.

José Afonso is current Portuguese national Surfcasting champion, it's the fifth time he achieves it, he also has a vice-world championship (in Portugal 2003), a third place last year in Italy world cup and currently holds third position on world rankings.

So last Saturday 4/2/2006, we arrived at the scheduled time 7:30am with tide starting to lower, temperature averaging 5ºC, Overcast sky and some strong wind coming from N that would make the journey very hard to endure.

So, we decided to shift to the north side of the beach also known as Supertubos. The waves were around 2 meter and would go down as the tide would lower.
The idea would be to fish for 5 hours, and try to preview a possible strategy for the 26th of february, the day of the real competition.

Listening to J.A. advices proved very valuable, his screen on current conditions proved very accurate since he knew from scratch that we would mainly get Weeverfish (Trachinus draco) and Turbot (Psetta maxima), only with some luck a possible White Seabream (Diplodus sargus sargus), Sea Bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) or Needle Fish (Xiphias gladius)would show up.

The tactic that proved best was to cast around 50m, between break point and the forming of the wave (100m) with 3m rigs (bigger proved to tangle easy). That seemed to have a subtle channel that proved to have some Weeverfish and even Turbot.

The bait we took to the beach was sandworm, lugworm, casulo and sardine. And again, counting on our target fish we tried them all, being the sandworm/lugworm sandwich with the tip of the hook covered with sardine that gave us the best results.

We restricted our bait group to just these because they are currently the ones we can use on regular competition; if we were not training for it of course other baits would be brought along.


In the end we only got around 5 Weeverfish each, and i even got a very small turbot. Not impressive results but i am sure we could easily get the triple of that if we were competing, because we weren’t doing timed casting and we also spent a lot of time just talking, in my case learning all sorts of things.

The water is also very cold at this time of the year on north Atlantic, so we can’t really expect much Surfcasting, in a competition day it would be reasonable that a lot of people wouldn’t get a single fish.


4:52 PM | |