Land-based angler Jeff from Off The Rocks has uploaded the kind of grinding, no-glamour shore session that most King George whiting chasers will recognise instantly: six hours, three beaches, a hand-me-down rod with a broken tip, a swarm of puffers and a finishing flourish of two big KGs lifted on drifted squid from less than ten feet off the stones.
The trip began with no plan. "So far, I don't have a plan on what I'm going to catch," Jeff said at the car. "I'm just going to go for a bit of a drive. I've got the bait pump in the boot. I've got a bunch of bait. I'm just going to travel around today and try and get ourselves a feed."
The first beach gave him an hour of nothing. He moved off-camera to a corner spot, fished thirty minutes more for nothing, then drove to a third location that he said is normally productive on lower tides. "It's a bit windier than what it was meant to be," he said as he set up. "This is normally a bit lower tide spot, but water's sort of being churned up a bit. As long as I can get out here without falling in the drink, that will be fine."
The rod he was fishing carried the weight of the day. "This old rod, she's just about end of a life, but I love it. It's a hand me down from my late father. So I've kind of been very attached to it." The tip had snapped on a previous trip - a brim session that ended in a bust-off so heavy the rod flicked straight up and launched the nipple tip into a marina, never to be recovered.
The new spot offered up a pufferfish on the first solid bite, a bust-off on something heavier, a foul-hook that ran into rocks, and a float jagged onto a ledge he had to half-swim to retrieve. "Been out here for about six hours," he said. "Zero fish, several broken lost lures, a rod that got all de-threaded, and I think it's got a broken tip cause it fell over."
The turnaround came on a last-ditch piece of drifted squid right at his feet. "Oh my god, now fish on this time," Jeff said as the rod loaded up. "It's a yellowfin whiting. Oh my god. It's a massive yellowfin. No, it's a big King George. Would you have a look at that? Holy crap. I'm not even about a three foot off the shore."
The fish measured 38 to 39 cm - a quality shore-caught King George by any Aussie standard. "Well, we'll take them every day, won't we?" Jeff said. "Not what I would expect. We're flicking maybe ten foot off. Wouldn't even be ten foot offshore. But yeah, might be a school of them there cause I kept getting a bite pretty well every single cast. About time. It's been a long day."
A second King George followed almost immediately on the same drifted squid presentation, but at 31 cm it fell just short of legal size and went back. A third KG, this one a clean 35 cm, came on the very next drift in only a couple of feet of water. "So they're just sitting out further past the pufferfish," he said. "Lovely 35 cm King George whiting straight off the rocks in a couple of feet of water. Lucky I had the bucket there."
Between the keepers were enough puffers to swallow most of his bait stock. "We're in a bit of trouble now with these things coming in non-stop. I'd say that this is the end of our nice little fishing hole." The puffer infestation eventually pushed him to switch to a bottom rig and chunks of fresh-fillet salmon further out into the reef - which produced exactly one more puffer before he called it.
The takeaways are familiar to anyone who has put time into shore-based KG fishing. The fish are willing to feed in genuinely shallow water at the right tide, drifted squid still beats finesse presentations in chop, and persistence over the long day matters more than the gear. "Call me an idiot," Jeff said before fishing one more rig out of stubborn habit, "but I just can't help myself. I'm still out here fishing."
