Yakabout - Berleying from the yak

Home

Articles

Berleying from the yak

PDF

| Print |

E-mail

Monday, 25 June 2007

Pros, cons and strategies for berleying from a kayak

Every fisherman worth his salt knows that using berley is a great to attract fish. I once read the perfect analogy as to how berley does (or should work), which went a bit like this: think of berley the same way cartoon artists would render a scene where 'Ma' is cooking up a storm in the kitchen. A visually apparent odour drifts from the food source and as a result, other characters follow their nose (usually a dog, floating through the air to the fuel of nostril power) to the kitchen as a result. Thats much like berley is supposed to work. Indeed, done properly, thats precisely how it works.

There is no debating that done right, laying down the berley can attract fish and often incite them into a feeding frenzy. The catch 22 for kayak fishermen, however, is that said berley might also attract sharks and they are the last thing you want nearby in a feeding frenzy... well, if they're big 'n toothy that is. Some yak fishoes just won't use berley because of this and well, you can't really blame anyone for that. Besides - there really are times when berley just isn't required anyway, not to mention that it's just one extra thing to take along.

Put into perspective, however, of the 400 species of shark swimming in our oceans today, only a handful of them are considered dangerous. You are 250 times more likely to be killed by lightning than you are by man-eating sharks, so why worry about them so much? Well, ok... it's because they're scary, I know - scary and real. But of those 400 species it is generally accepted that less than 10 of them pose any threat to humans. And they are generally no where near as aggressive as they are typically made out to be. So as kayak fishermen, should we be worried about such unwanted side effects of using berley? It's not something other boaters really have to worry about but there isn't a lot of freeboard between kayak fisherman and water surface, is there.

It's a no-brainer that by being out on the water as often as we are, shark attacks are more likely, sure. But even then the odds swing heavily in our favour. Sharks don't go looking for trouble. It's just that sometimes we kind of put ourselves in harms way... like everytime we step into a vehicle, or eat a pretzel. In my opinion, the most important considerations to deliberate on the probability of sharks are the time of day and the intended fishing location. Most or all off-shore coastal areas around Australia should be investigated for the known presence of species such as Great white sharks, Tiger sharks, Mako sharks, Hammerhead sharks, Blacktip reef sharks and Bronze Whaler sharks. There has also been accounts of attacks on kayak fishermen in New Zealand.

I'm no expert on these species, although I have been reading up and the more I do, the less concerned I become about having problems with them. That said, I remain acutely aware of what something like a GW is capable of. I have generally always been fairly cautious about berleying up in deeper waters, particularly on coastal trips outside of my regular playground of Port Phillip Bay. I have had a lot of success using it in shallow waters, however, and in some instances has made the difference between catching fish and not. Using berley is something I'd probably always resort to if I was restricted to land based fishing, thats for sure.

There are a lot of ways you can go about about making your own homemade berley, limited only by your own imagination. The most resourceful among us will reuse any fish scraps, diced or minced for redeployment into the sea, thrown back cubed or combined into a dry-reach provoking soup. Fish guts, bread crumbs and or crushed weet bix can also be a particularly deadly combination. I usually take one of two approaches when laying down the berley. My favourite way is to make use of a heavy duty meat mincer to make mince-fish bits out of off cuts, and mix this into a thick stinky paste with some bread crumbs and weet bix. I'd then form it into large balls (think soft-ball size) and freeze them. Placed in a mesh bag and lowered to the seabed tied to the anchor, the berley bomb slowly thaws and dissolves into an alluring aroma that smells just like dinner cooking on the stove (to the fish, that is). The trick in having success with this is figuring out which way that trail will go and making sure your bait ends up several meters up current of it. For best results, the bait should be the same as was used to make the fish mince.

Another approach that I find works well on days of slow current is to dice up some off cuts into some smallish appetizing size chunks and to throw small hands fulls of them into the water periodically. In my experience, this strategy works best when unweighted rigs are baited with slightly larger, more satisfying looking chunks of the same fishy off cuts. Allow the bait to drift into the berley trail and if it's doing what it is supposed to, your chances of hooking are increased greatly.

But yes... both of these methods are examples of the kind of berley strategy that does have potential to arouse the interest of nearby sharks. So if this is something you are worried about, think very carefully about where you plan to do it, if at all. And if you're really, really worried about sharks, it might pay for you to get yourself a Shark Shield (an option I certainly haven't ruled out).