Top 3 baits you don’t have to buy

You can buy pre-packaged frozen bait throughout Australia. However, sometimes bait from a freezer can be old, fall apart easily, and will never catch as much compared with self-caught live bait.

While finding it can sometimes be hard work, once you’ve collected your own bait it can definitely be worth the time and trouble, with proven results.

Anglers who collect their own bait also will need a range of tools and accessories.

That said, here are three top baits that will hopefully ensure your fishing trip is a success.

Yabbies – also known as nippers – are easy to catch and are a top bait choice for targeting popular estuary species.

You can easily find them by looking for small clusters of round holes in the sand.

The easiest way to collect these guys is to use a yabby pump, a long cylinder that sucks up a column of sand, at low tide to extract them from the sand flats.

Insert the pump in the same spot about four or five times, ensuring that you splash the watery sand out onto a bank so you can see the nippers in the sand.

If you’ve missed low tide, you can pump in water up to about 30cm deep. If doing it this way, pump the sand into a sieve to separate out the yabbies.

Pick up the yabbies you collect, being careful of their nippers, and put them in a bucket of salt water. Change the water regularly to keep them fresh.

When baiting up, rig a whole yabby on a long shank hook. Most species of fish find live yabbies irresistible.

One of the most common baits seen, and used, in estuaries are prawns.

Despite their escalating cost and relative scarcity compared with how widespread they once were, prawns continue to be one of the most easily handled, simply rigged and dependable amateur baits around.

Here in Queensland, it is legal to use a cast net to catch fresh bait prawns. Learning how to correctly throw a cast net takes practice and patience but once learnt, it’s a very handy skill.

Anyone can put a prawn on a hook, and they will still attract bites even when they’re badly rigged – even a novice angler can sometimes fluke a fish.

However, like everything else in fishing, the more intelligently you approach using prawns, the more successful they will be as bait.

Instead of piercing the hook through the middle of the prawn, try threading the hook down from just under the tail, and through the prawn’s body so it sits flush and reasonably straight down along the hook shank.

This is a more natural appearance and therefore will attract more bites and hopefully better fish.

Blood worms like mud and weed flats as a habitat. The best time to go searching is at low tide.

They make top bait when fished live for blackfish, bream, whiting, flathead and a host of other tasty targets.

Burrowing for bloodworms is backbreaking work, as they are rarely found in the surface layer of mud. Instead, you’ll have to chase them to a depth of 30cm or more.

The best tool for the job is a gardening fork, which is used to turn over the mud.

Once I have some bloodworms, though, I usually rig them on a long shank hook. Start by holding the worm firmly behind the head, and thread the hook down between the pincers of the bloodworm’s jaw.

You can usually pinch the worm off about a centimetre below the end of the hook, giving you two baits from each worm.

Any keen angler will spend as much time getting their bait as they do catching the fish. However, they will almost be guaranteed to enjoy a fun day out on the water with it.

As always, check local restrictions on the equipment you can use, such as cast nets, to gather bait.