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Sooner or later a salmon is going to see your lure and take a bite of it! |
Sometimes it just takes a great deal of perseverance to catch a salmon. Even the best salmon anglers have "dry spells" when they struggle to catch a salmon. You often hear the saying "...that the first salmon of the season is always the hardest to catch!"
Some anglers go years between fish. The real secret is to put in as much time as possible when the salmon are present in the rivers so you are fishing "high probability water." Persistence is the key. Just keep at it and you will eventually succeed.
You might hear that a particularly successful angler has caught say 12 salmon for the season. However you often don't hear about how many actual fishing hours were required by that angler to catch each one of those 12 fish! One year I caught a salmon within 15 minutes at the start of the season. Other years it has taken me a lot longer to catch that first one. Oddly I have often caught a salmon soon after arriving at a stretch of water. Other times I have fished for days on end without touching a fish!
The absolute best time to catch salmon is at first light in the morning. This is particularly so when fishing the surf or a hole as new fish will have arrived overnight. Those fish will not have seen any hardware cast in their direction over night.
Salmon are often caught in the surf at a rivermouth during a two hour period at the top of the tide; with very few fish being caught outside this time period. A line of salmon anglers may take 20 or 30 fish over a couple of hours with not much happening for the rest of the day.
An excellent match for the Kilwell Enticer 1200TW would be the Abu 7500 or the Abu 7000C. These reels are designed for long distance casting and are tremendously popular with New Zealand salmon anglers. Salmon taken on a Shimano Calcutta CT-700 baitcaster reel.
You might also be interested in: Salmon Spinners, and White Salmon Lures, and Salmon Super Spinners, young salmon being released at Montrose, and Fishing for Salmon, Trout and Kahawai.
Salmon and Trout Introductions into South Canterbury.
Return to Salmon Fishing In New Zealand
