The following is an excerpt from Steve Correia’s new book – “How To Catch A Fish”. It’s available at all Newsagents, Ranger Outdoors stores, Angus & Robertson bookshops and selected tackle outlets. Steve is also available for Fishing Lessons by emailing him – steve@zulumedia.com.au

Introduction

The bonito could be regarded as the only tuna most of us are ever going to catch from shore in WA. Sure, you might snag a longtail or yellowfin from Steep Point at some time in your fishing career but, in reality, most anglers never get there.

For those who want to tick a tuna of any kind off their piscatorial shopping list, the bonito is sometimes the only option and, for many, is often the first species they chase with a style called sportfishing.

Some mornings at North Mole, space can be a premium as people launch a huge array of different minnow style lures, tied to light tackle, towards Leighton. Evenings during summer at the Woodman Point Ammo Jetty can be standing room only as hopefuls brave carpark bandits searching for this elusive fish.

Their lures can be almost 20 bucks a pop and some nights are marked by broken car windows, let alone the regular disappointment of no schools bothering to show up. So why would an angler spend so much time and money chasing a fish you’d rather return to the water than eat?

For the fight!

How to Catch Them

As I said before, the bonito is part of the tuna family but not much study has been done on this feisty little fish. They grow to about 3 or 4 kilos on their best day but most you’ll catch around southern WA are going to be 2 kilos or less. In fact, in the last 10 years the average size seems to have dropped substantially.

But they do have the redeeming quality of being an inshore hunter and this means that, over the warmer months, they’ll be quite happy to pay a visit to the rockwalls around Perth and give you a crack at them.

When I was growing up, bonito were just about the first fish we accepted as being better targeted with lures. We’d either tie on a Nilsmaster or Bomber Long A in fluoro colours and let them fly from North Mole.

As a boy, I’d often get up at 2am to make the two hour ride to Fremantle, loaded to the gills with bonito chasing tackle, rather than risk missing out on a good possie to some late rising sod with a car. Many a day I’d be flying down Leach Highway in the pitch dark, only to have my tackle box make a leap for freedom and share itself among the residents of Melville.

Lures are still popular from rockwalls, both metals and minnows, but from jetties there’s been a trend towards live baits.

Southern groynes and rockwalls that are popular bonito locations include North Mole, Woodman Point, South Mole and Hillarys (to a lesser degree), the Dawesville Cut at times and a few sporadic outcrops in the south. Albany and Esperance seem to be the places where the bonito are more likely to want to come in close.

Boaties will see a lot more bonito schools than shore based anglers, often in the form of small surface bust-ups with bird activity above them. Why the schools tend to come in to only a certain number of land based locations is a mystery because they certainly aren’t like salmon that could pop up anywhere.

You rarely see bonito around Pt Peron but you will find them in Cockburn Sound from jetties such as Palm Beach, Kwinana and Woodman Point from the ammo jetty just behind the caravan park. In the south, the Busselton Jetty is far and away the most popular location and its length seems to mean you get more schools here than almost anywhere else.

From rockwalls, you really want to be casting lures for the most part. Bonito are opportunistic hunters and tend to grab whatever they see flying past, so bright colours are a good idea. Medium divers with a fluoro pattern, orange, gold and yellow seem to be preferred, while natural colours will work, but to a slightly lesser degree.

The market is full of these minnows and, really, anything with a good wiggle and a realistic swimming action is going to work. The key is literally being able to drag your lure past a school of feeding fish, and this isn’t as easy as it once was.

Schools are less common and the size of these schools is smaller. Compounding this is the fact that those that do make it to shore seem to be breakaway groups from the larger packs found further offshore.

But if the bonnies do make it to your spot, you’ll see rods going down like dominoes as the ferocious fish can’t resist a crack at a minnow or metal slice. Try to keep your retrieves at a medium pace for minnows, without letting them stop. For metals, make sure the lure is performing with a fluttering action and don’t wind it so fast that it breaks the surface. 20-50g slices are best, with enough weight to cast and a size large enough to get the fish’s attention.

If you encounter a school offshore, surface boiling and birds wheeling overhead, position yourself upwind of the feeding school and cut your engines if possible. Using a very small slice, cast behind the fish and let it sink to a count of 10. The reason we use a small slice is that quite often these schools are feeding on tiny bait and, frankly, your 80g Raider just looks a bit suss, even to them!

Now wind reasonably fast, once again not letting the lure come out of the water at any time. Fish will often chase it right to the boat, so keep your concentration up for the whole retrieve.

Offshore fishing for bonito is easy enough but what if you don’t have an ocean going machine? How do you find them? Well, fishing reports can be a guide but they can often be many days old and the school might have only popped up for a couple of hours last week. If lots of guys were into them, all of a sudden they’re “running” and every man and his dog shows up with a Nilsmaster and a truckload of hope.

Unfortunately, bonito are what we call “pelagic” and that means they roam the oceans looking for food, going wherever the combination of baitfish and their preferred current and water temperature takes them.

For this reason I recommend staking out your favourite groyne if you want to fish lures and just putting in the time there. If they showed up a couple of times this month already, they’ll be back and you just have to be Johnny-On-The-Spot. Early mornings are best but late afternoons can also work well. As a rule, substantially less bonito are caught from shore during the bright period of the day so, if you don’t have time to waste, plan your trips around sunrise and sunset.

Casting lures can be tiring, especially if there’s other fish about and no sign of a bonnie school. From the rocks you don’t really have a lot of choice but from a jetty you can try live baiting.

It stands to reason that bonito spend most of their lives eating live fish, so popping one out under a balloon is a lazy but effective way of waiting them out. From a jetty this is ideal, as long as you’ve got the wind behind you to carry the baits out of the way of the other anglers. From a groyne it’s not quite so easy and you’re likely to annoy everyone around you and end up with a less of a screaming drag and more of a knuckle sandwich.

But floating a livey out from a jetty is very relaxing and it gives you time to mess about with herring or yellowtail (perfect live baits) while you wait for the little tuna to arrive.

The rig is simple. Use a balloon (or a float in a pinch) to drift the live bait out with the wind, your slightly unhappy offering suspended about 70cm underneath on a leader. Bonnies have some small, sharp teeth and they can bite through mono, so at least a 20-40lb coated mono leader is a good idea. Personally, I like to use 20lb fluorocarbon as I would for dolphinfish, as it’s almost invisible and top notch for this job.

Try to keep it out of the casting distance of anyone throwing lures so they aren’t being tangled up by your balloon, and lock it off with a medium drag setting. Woodman Point and, especially, the Busselton Jetty are the two places you’ll regularly see this technique in action.

Watch your balloon carefully. If a school turns up the livey will get the jitters and a bonito will hit him hard (that’d make anyone jittery). Bait size should be reasonably small but they’ll have no trouble getting through a whole yellowtail, slimy mackerel or small herring.

If you have a small boat, bonito season can be a lot of fun. Trolling the Fremantle moles and Cockburn jetties can get you into bonnies quite easily, plus you have the added bonus of tailor, salmon and even small samsonfish nailing the lure. Make sure you keep your distance from the shore based anglers because they get few chances to target tuna and it’s only fair that they have a chance to fish without your boat performing what amounts to a middle finger gesture at those not lucky enough to have one.

You can also drop down a lure size and go for a deeper diver, making fish more likely to have a big swipe at your offering. The fun really comes when you break out the 2 or 4 pound tackle, something not recommended from shore to avoid tangles with others. Sitting in your dinghy, watching the bonito tear strips from your small reel, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s not too many better ways to spend a summer morning.

Prospects for 2008

It was great to see more bonito showing up in the last 12 months than we’d seen for a while. North Mole had a really late start to the season, with March just about the peak, and other spots were similar. The sizes have been smaller than in the past but big numbers offshore are a good sign. If 2008 continues as la Niña, this summer is shaping up well for bonito.