Martyn White | Thursday, 8 September 2022
I've not strung up a rod or wet a line this week, but I've still fished a couple of days so far. Tomorrow I'm going again and I'll most likely be making some casts. It didn't occur to me that this might seem odd to anyone until I spoke to Canadian John the other day, he just couldn't get his head round the idea.
So what's this all about? Well mullet really. I've been trying to get to where I can catch them reasonably consistently for a while now, but so far the only thing that has been consistent has been a lack of success. I've got flies that I know work, I've more or less figured out how to present flies to the flathead mullet we have here, but I'm not actually catching many. There are a couple of reasons for this; one is lack of time spent targeting them, but the other is what I expect to be the key and that's solving the mark and tide equation. So I've spent about 18 hours walking around the Tama estuary looking at mud and sand flats, checking access and trying to spot mullet. You can also do that while actively fishing, but it really reduces how much ground you can cover. If the rod is just left on the backpack, it's easier to cover several KMs and get a look at different marks on different stages of the tide. I've now earmarked a few places that I think will be good right at the bottom, a couple for around the middle, and a few that I can try near the top. I just couldn't have covered enough ground to see all this while fishing. Now when I go down tomorrow I'll be able to optimise my fishing time to suit the tide, by planning a route that will let me cover the likely areas. It's no guarantee of success, but I think it'll pay off and if it does, success breeds confidence and I'll probably spend more time on the mullet than I do now which will hopefully create a sort of virtuous cycle of improvement.
Those big flat-head mullet definitely deserve the attention, they're fairly abundant, great fighters and they get pretty big around here.