you'll probably find most people use forums such as www.fishnet.com.au or
local ones in your state eg. www.fishsa.com.au and www.fishep.com.au here in
South Oz (no doubt there are others all other states/territories).
Traffic is pretty light in this newsgroup (I have the occasional look)

"John" wrote in message
...
G'day

I've just got back into fishing after a 5 or so year break because of
bad health and have been lurking in here for a few weeks, not sure if
it's my slack news server but I'm kinda suprised at how few the
postings are in here. For some reason I thought a fishing newsgroup
would be a lot more popular.

Anyway, I thought I would come out of lurking and post a recent
fishing experience. I've been fishing on a small rocky outcrop at
Lemon Tree Passage in Port Stephens and have been catching a few
flathead and whiting. I have been a little disappointed as my
favourite type of fishing is for bream and this spot looks like there
should be plenty of bream. I'd been catching plenty of small bream and
even a few that were almost legal so I thought after dark there would
be plenty of bigguns about but as soon as the sun went down I wasn't
even getting a bite (except for a huge stingray that had me excited
for about 20 minutes). For bait I had tried yabbies, prawns, worms,
mullet and white bait.

The other day I took some bread with me because I had noticed mullet
and gars in the shallows near the rocks. I threw some bread in the
water while I was fishing on the bottom and there was soon a heap of
fish attacking the bread so I grabbed my other rod that I had rigged
with a pencil float and put a bit of bread on and dropped it in the
water hoping to catch a mullet or garfish. The float wasn't more than
about 10ft away from me in about a foot of water when the float
disappeared. There was a moment of panic because I had the rod lying
across my lap and was crushing up some sao bickies for berley. I
grabbed the rod and was hooked up, I wasn't sure what it was but it
was giving me a good run for my money on the light gar gear and kept
heading towards the oyster rocks. I eventually pulled in a nice bream
about 1.5lb, I caught 5 more about the same size before calling it a
day. Since then I've been catching bream everytime I go using the same
method.

I've tried using prawn under the float but they are only interested in
the bread. Not that I'm complaing because bread is a lot cheaper than
buying prawns and better on the back than pumping yabbies. My only
problem is berlying them up without the mongrel seagulls spotting me
and stealing the berley and scaring the fish off.

Sorry if I bored anyone, cheers and good fishing....JC