Chicken soaked in oyster sauce + berley = bream action

It was late Sunday arvo and after tinkering on the tinny Mad Dog and I decided to go for a fish on the Maribyrnong River. We picked an area right next to where a dead body had been found a while back.

We fished the estuary under the Raleigh Road Bridge near the Anglers Tavern because the bridge pylons provided some obvious cover and a food source from the small shell fish that grew on them. I was float fishing ala English style - here's how and why I do it.

We were ground bating with bream crumbs and ultrabite berley (75/25) and I was using chicken in oyster sauce for bait. I have never used this bait before but a guy at the local BCF said it outfished anything else. I have heard chicken works really well on other species too. I pre prepared the bait by cutting it up into small pieces which I marinated in the fridge for a few hours with a nice coating of oyster sauce. And the result...

The ground bait took about 5 minutes to kick in and then we had some action. We caught 3 small fish and lost a number of others. They were really going crazy for about half an hour or so. The fish went off the bite after the first hour even though we kept feeding the area. I assume this was because the tide was falling. We missed the peak of the tide by two hours so perhaps it was a little too low to really get a lot of fish. Apparently the bream chase the small mullet up and down the river with the tide.

The lessons learned from this trip were:

• Try chicken soaked in oyster sauce as a saltwater bait, it's cheap, stays on the hook and the bream seem to love it. The oyster sauce must let off a nice fishy scent too.
• Bring another bait as well. Perhaps the fish would have kept biting if we had other bait to try? Bread and prawns are obvious possibilities.
• Make sure you fish the rising tide to the top of the tide.
• Don't wear good shoes to fishing spots, they end up with mud all over them!