Speargun Help!!

[Spaniard]

I think Pastor posted a link to a company which sells crimping tools/crimps for big-game fishing. The right crimper with the right crimp will always 'squeeze' to the right pressure. Was it leadertec?

 

[theykilledkenny]

will a cheap crimper, the ones that look like pliers, the small hand crimpers, be good enough??
azapa: thanks, ofcourse i eat the fish. i dont usually shoot mullet, but that one was actually very tasty fried.
im pretty sure that the smaller ones are coubali jacks. anyone know for sure? theyre supposed to get bigger than the ones i shot, but those were the largest ive ever seen here. if anyone can tell me if those are big enough to be 'taken', because if not then i wont shoot them anymore. would be a pity though, i love them. and what these fish are called, plz post

 

[azapa]

i'll probably get in trouble here from all the pro's, but yes, if you are very carfull a cheap crimper will work. MAKE SURE IT WON'T LET YOU CLOSE ALL THE WAY, they usually have a stop. You will see that it has yellow, blue and red dots (in that order) on the mouth. The red one normally is perfect and produces the results you see in my crimps. Are those jacks oily with a strongish smell and darker flesh? Do the have a little horizontal row of boney bumps laterally towards the tail? They are JUREL here, I think, and I hate to eat them, to fiddly to fillet. How did you cook them?

 

[theykilledkenny]

just fried in oil. one of the best fish i ever ate.
but no, no smell, not really oily and white flesh except for a bit of soft dark flesh along the sides. they do have the row of bony scales towards the tail.
do you eat mullet?

 

[azapa]

to be honest never tried mullet. too much other yummy stuff (still) around here.

image of similar crappy crimpers to ones I use (sorry again pros, you must be cringing at my poor taste in tools..)..

 

[Mr. X]

do you eat mullet?

I've eaten several Mullet this year, they tasted excellent, similar to Bass but a slightly stronger taste. We actually preferred it to bass. Interestingly TV chef Hugh Fernely-Wittingstall also preferred Mullet to Bass on the recent River Cottage Goes Fishing programme.

Foxfish has mentioned previously that Mullet are related to Bass but the taste of mullet varies much more than Bass, presumably with location/diet/... andhe recommended removing the lateral line (red flesh? I didn't notice this). Somebody else suggested skinning them. I probably would not eat mullet from a harbour, river estuary or anywhere near a sewage outlet (but is it any worse than eating organic vegetables grown with manure?). The fish I caught were on remote beaches away from human habitation (unfortunately one of them, it turns out, was 4km from a radioactive waste discharge pipe). Folk often recommend that you gut mullet as soon as possible. I usually clean them at the water's edge when leaving the water.

They taste best fresh or recently frozen - freezing for too long and they get rubbery (had one like that recently, or perhaps it was overcooked, or both). We normally just gut the fish & de-scale it (I sometimes forget!) - slash the sides & coat with olive oil, garlic and stuff it with lots of fennel & grill it. Serve with limes or lemon. BTW mullet can grow quite large. 2lb - 4lb mullet are not unusual (2kg/56cm). I saw one recently that was probably 6lb+ (3kg+) - my spear just bounced off its gill area.

[BTW you don't have to crimp the spear-line. I roughen my line with a soldering iron, whip it with cord & then superglue it. It's quite neat & has a low profile.]

The pictures below show a Bass but we cook Mullet the same way. Simple but tastes great:

 

[Pastor]

I've eaten several Mullet this year, they tasted excellent, similar to Bass but a slightly stronger taste. We actually preferred it to bass. Interestingly TV chef Hugh Fernely-Wittingstall also preferred Mullet to Bass on the recent River Cottage Goes Fishing programme.

Me too but still for some reason (snobbery I guess) Bass is still my preferred choice of prey when hunting.

Foxfish has mentioned previously that Mullet are related to Bass but the taste of mullet varies much more than Bass, presumably with location/diet/... andhe recommended removing the lateral line (red flesh? I didn't notice this).

Location of the fish does seem to have a big influence on what it tastes like. Clean water Mullet are quite superb I find the thought of eating the lateral line quite yuchy rofl I would definitely agree with that

 

[Fondueset]

FYI - in case you didn't know - gutting right away is generally smart because most parasites live in the viscera and move into the flesh after death.

 

[theykilledkenny]

ive tried gutting fish in the water, and 'recycling' the guts as chum. didnt work though
what is a soldering iron? and how do you 'whip it with cord'??

 

[Mr. X]

Merry Christmas all!

Hi Pastor, yes Bass is still something special. Last year I never saw a single mullet - only bass & wrasse. This year I've seen far more large mullet than large bass (I've seen several large shoals of small bass). However, I take them as they come. Both are most welcome & the mullet are tremendous fighters, pound for pound.

Hi Fondueset, that makes some sense. I think there is something particular about mullet - perhaps because they have a reputation of eating sewage.

ive tried gutting fish in the water, and 'recycling' the guts as chum. didnt work though
what is a soldering iron? and how do you 'whip it with cord'??

Re. whipping, eh hem. It just means tightly wrapped with thread/cord/string. One of the Guernsey spearos first posted images of the technique; you could try searching for them. The image below is from the S. Devon 2007 thread -- & fortuitously shows my whipped spearline & a mullet. I used proper whipping cord that was given to me when I bought an anchor rope, for whipping the rope ends. It is just thin, strong, probably nylon string.

 

[Pastor]

Hi Pastor, yes Bass is still something special. Last year I never saw a single mullet - only bass & wrasse. This year I've seen far more large mullet than large bass (I've seen several large shoals of small bass). However, I take them as they come. Both are most welcome & the mullet are tremendous fighters, pound for pound.

Strangely I saw many more Mullet than Bass this year too. Last year there were some shoals of smaller fish around a couple of the regular spots. This year the shoals were still there but the fish seemed to be much bigger. I thought they had just grown but I'm told that Mullet are very slow growing so perhaps they were actually just different fish? Who knows but yes much much more of them, or was it just far fewer Bass

Did you read about that bug bugger I saw earlier in the year? Well I'll type it out again because it's the best fish I have ever seen and I just like telling the story Sometime in July or August I was fishing alone off one of the usual beaches. The vis was pretty bad for the time of year, absolute maximum of 2m. So over the course of a long mornings fruitless efforts and starting to get fed up I dive down into the depths (about 12-15ft rofl). So I'm lying on the bottom behind a rock or some weed, I don't remember which now, when I see or rather perceive something moving just out of sight. It was more like a faint shadow the sort of thing you only thought you saw but this was quite big. My gun was more or less on that point but I couldn't see what it was so I didn't fire, there had been a seal on that reef a couple of days before (or even that day, my memories seem to mingle al my dives up).

Anyway to cut a long story short, I decide to call it a day and start swimming back to the beach, still looking for fish on the way, well you never know Then in the comparative shallows around some rocks that form part of a fantastic feeding run from my left I see a huge fish move in. My gun was quickly on it but I didn't shoot, it was a Mullet that was as long as the screen on our 42" telly and super fat. It just swam slowly past looking at me, it was as if it knew I wasn't going to harm it. I just tracked the fish like I was on auto pilot and watched it swim by for perhaps 4-5 seconds to give you an idea of how slowly it swam by in that bad vis.

I don't think many people actually believed my story, I think most thought it an exaggeration but then in September HEDS saw the same fish in similar circumstances. Another mate also said he saw a very large Mullet too but I'm not sure if that was the same one as it was quite a way up into the next bay. Anyway, it was a very cool thing to see and a very nice memory, all the better for knowing it is still out there somewhere

 

[foxfish]

Pastor, didn't the British rod caught come from somewhere in Whales but wasn't there some controversy about it growing so large because it grew in a landlocked area feed by warm water from a power station? About 14lb I think but there were some over 20 in the sea lake!
The Guernsey rod record is 11lb something (caught in Alderney)

 

[Pastor]

Yes it was 14 -2 -12 (just looked that up rofl) but it was caught in Barry about 70 miles south as the crow flies, or Mullet swims. We do have a nuclear power station on Anglesey that pumps out warm water, I wonder if that has anything to do with it?

 

[Pastor]

Just had a look on google maps and the outfall looks very similar to what we have up here. Might well be the reason! Well observed Mr F

 

[Old Man Dave]

We do have a nuclear power station on Anglesey that pumps out warm water, I wonder if that has anything to do with it?

How many heads did it have?

Dave

 

[Pastor]

Just one at each end Dave Closely followed by Dr Doolittle

 

[Mr. X]

instead of opening a new thread:
the flopper on my spear seems really loose, it opens and closes whenever it wants, and if i open it all the way, the hold the spear upright, it just folds back down. should it be like this?

I was surprised by Pastors answer to this. I would have said this is normal. In fact, if the barb is tight, I make sure that I oil it, so that it can open freely. However, I agree with Pastor that the barb on my RA only opens so far, and when fully open, it has a tendency to stay open (this is less critical for SA spears as they hang down and gravity tends to keep them open anyway). Perhaps your barb is particularly loose.

 

[Pastor]

The reason I have the barb tightening up at about 45 degrees is so that once the shaft is through the fish the barb will be kept open and reduce the risk of the shaft pulling out in a fight. Only happened to me once and I was lucky enough to see where the fish hid so I reloaded and whacked it again. Never again though will I have a flopper that won't jam itself open. From my limited experience with Rob Allen shafts they are pretty good like that straight from the factory.

 

[theykilledkenny]

:head156 pages on the guernsey thread. can anyone tell me where the part about the soldering mono thing is??

i did the thing pastor advised me to and the barb is still loose, but locks open when opened all the way.
AMAZING mullet!! mullet are everywhere here, all over the place but not close to that big!
ive only seen one bass in my life and it was about 20 cm only. where do you find them? i know that when you fish with a rod, you supposed to go fish them in the surf. spearfishing is the same?
and how sharp do you keep your speartips? i keep sharpening mine but as hard as i try, i end up flattening my new tip on a rock.
merry christmas everyone

 

[Pastor]

Magpie mentions it at about post 78 in http://forums.deeperblue.net/beginner-hunting/64504-dummies-guide-rigging-speargun.html I sympathise that Guernsey thread is a nightmare to find anything in. They have their own forum now so fingers crossed they will start to make more specific threads so we can all find the information easily