Where:	Hillarys Marina, north of Perth
When:	All year in clear water
Gear:	10kg spinning rod 10” long with a spinning reel and 14lb Fireline
Tackle:	Quill Float, small Gamakatsu Work G-Lock Hooks
Bait:	Berley made from flour, pollard and water
Lure:	N/A
Leader:	20lb Fluorocarbon

Although you’ll find them cruising along just about all of southern WA’s rockwalls, buff bream are a very misunderstodd fish. Being a weed eater, the buff guard and actually nurture their family’s weed and kelp beds like a half-mad market gardener with a scarecrow and a shotgun. There are known as Territorial Gardneners.

Each border is patrolled by territory holders and, often, roving groups of buffies will challenge for the claim, but territory is vigorously defended and most often individuals within the group only manage to snatch a mouthful or two before they are chased away.

While most fish dedicate a large part of their day to hunting, buffalo bream have no need for such frivolities but up to 20% of their time is spent defending their patch from rogue elements. If the kelp bed is in shallow water, the fish will stay there until the last possible minute before retreating to a cave at low tide, until the rising water covers their patch once again.

They’re smart, they’re tough and a worthy opponent for any shore based angler. So why don’t people eat them? Well, their taste has been compared unfavourably to decaying battery acid, and that has meant a fairly good run for buffies when it comes to anglers tormenting them.

Until now …

Anyone who’s accidentally hooked a buff will tell you just how tough they are to land. They’re really just an occasional by-catch in Perth for most anglers, but what if you really wanted to target them … how do you do it?

Well, the first thing you need to do is think like a vegan and that means throwing out the meat. You could try weed but, frankly, they’ve got loads of that already. Unless they’re really hungry they’ll act like a MacDonalds cook around fries for the 1,734th day in row – not interested!

But if you throw a juicy sirloin or crayfish our jaded deep fry cook’s way, provided he’s no vego, he’ll find it very hard to say no. So what’s a sirloin to a buff bream? The answer is berley.

Have you ever been herring fishing and seen buffies attack your berley as you discard it at the end of a fishing session? They just love the stuff and there’s no way they can grow their own, no matter how industrious they are! This is the key to your buffalo bream hunt.

I’ve done a lot of experimentation with berley and here’s the best way I’ve found to make it irresistible to them, and yet solid enough to stay on a hook during the cast and when they peck at it on your hook.

Start with pollard and give yourself a couple of good sized cups. Then add water so it’s a sticky oatmeal consistency. When you squeeze it in your hands you shouldn’t get moisture coming out. Now comes the secret weapon, the flour.

Flour keeps the berley, which will also be your bait, on the hook because it toughens the mixture to almost a type of glue. Add almost as much flour as you did pollard and get it even thicker than cookie dough and about as sticky. If you think you can leave the flour out, you’re mistaken. It’s the KEY to buffy success.

Now put your berley into a container and squish it down hard. Pop it into the fridge overnight and, in the morning, you’ll have a perfect bait for buffalo bream. Now, onto the gear you’ll need …

I chose, from past experience of having my butt kicked by these fish, to run with a 10 foot Pacific Components surf rod, matched to a spinning reel with 14lb Fireline. Remember, you’re fishing around rocks that these fish have a close relationship with, and they’re quite happy to bring your tackle home to meet the family.

An important aspect is a quill float. Suspending your bait is another key to success and avoiding snags so, with a modern quill float, you can vary your leader length quite easily and keep your bait out of the rocks. Leaders are also vital and I chose to start with 6lb fluorocarbon and move my way up if I was getting blitzed.

Don’t forget, some of these fish are 10 pounds plus, quite easily the largest fish commonly found around the average marina and they know how to scrap. So why such a small leader? Well, the big problem is that while they’re brutes, they’re far from stupid and they’ll easily see and shy away from heavy or badly presented leaders.

Hook wise, I go as small as I can because these fish have tiny mouths in comparison to their body size. They also like to fiddle with the baits so I went with the smallest Worm G-Locks I could find. Octopus hooks are pretty good too, but keep them small, around a #8 or #6.

The sticky berley I made earlier is going to be our bait, but it’s also a good idea to get some pellets to fire them up. The final thing you’ll need is a good, long net.

OK, we’re geared up, now we need to find our fish.

Buffalo bream are very common around rocks, especially marina walls. You’ll find them at North Mole, South Mole, Hillarys, Ocean Reef, Mindarie, Two Rocks and just about anywhere there’s no swell and some reasonably deep water.

Another thing to consider is water clarity. Unlike most fish I’ve targeted, it seems that the clearer and calmer the water is, the better chance you’ll have to catch them.
                                                                    
Our method was to take the time to make marble sized balls out of our bait and shower the water with them. Buffies would charge from everywhere and greedily scoff them down. While one of us would keep the berley coming, a few marbles at a time, we’d flick the float out there with a leader about 120cm long. You literally just need to roll your arm to get it a few feet from the rocks.

Roughly every 15 minutes, one of the school would let their guard down and throw caution to the wind, and then it would hit the fan. Even with my surf rod I had little or no control over the monster on the other end going backside down at the sharpest rock it could find.

At the end of filming Day One, the score was buffies 15, Stevo and Paul … 2! And the couple we actually managed to get the net under were just pushing a kilo. Not exactly the huge fish we knew were there, had hooked several times, and just couldn’t land.

As we dropped leader size, the hookups were more frequent but the bustoffs were inevitable. If we went to heavier leaders, no hookups at all. We were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea and needed to go home and have a think.

After a close inspection of our gear at home, we came to the conclusion that the bigger fish weren’t busting us off, they were biting us off! Several times we had hooks just vanish after the smallest possible strike, and close inspection of the dentures of the smaller fish we’d landed revealed small but raspy little teeth.

The consensus was that we’d never land the big ones on light leaders so we’d just have to fire them up so much they’d hit 20lb fluorocarbon. Easier said than done.

At about the top of the first hour, I berleyed a group into a frenzy at the base of the rock I was perched on and gently rolled my bait into the middle of the pack of decoys. Man, I wasn’t even close to prepared for this fish. Probably well over the 10 pound mark if the visuals were anything to go by and, one thing was certain, he wasn’t happy. The odds went from 2 to 1 on, then back to 10 to 1 in his favour before the tell-tale feeling of rock-on-Fireline signaled that this horse had bolted.

Still, it gave us encouragement that if you get them good and fired up, they would certainly get the red mists long enough to forget about the heavy leader and gulp down a bait loaded with my little G-Lock.

This brings me to another important point; you can’t be stingy with the berley and don’t think you’ll overfeed them. We were bringing a couple of ice cream containers two thirds full of compressed berley each day and using pretty much the whole lot in a few hours of fishing.

My back was turned when Paul let out another battle cry. “Good fish! Gooood FISH!”

He was better equipped for day two, this time with a solid Penn 10 footer and 14 pound Fireline. Still, this battle was going from bad to worse. The first had literally headed west along the rocks, knitting Fireline line in and out like a granny at the football.

But Paul was not in the mood for another failure. Off he went along the rocks, leaping in single steps across jagged ravines he never would have considered going near, until the panic of losing yet another huge buff with the cameras rolling loomed large.

As I approached with the net, he had extracted it from the rocks but the leader was caught around some barnacles and a wave shaped up a mere four feet away. I had only one chance and lunged the net forward.

“I’ve got it!” and we did the happy dance. The 20 pound leader had proven its value and so had our patience and tenacity. Up close this was one impressive fish and the broad shoulders coupled with that powerful tail were testament enough to the reason why we’d been having so much trouble.

Awesome stuff, but now I had to scratch my itch.

We bombed the water and soon another big fish from the school couldn’t resist the urge to test me out. This time I wasn’t taking any prisoners. It tore up the rocks but I clamped down, the Fireline stopping it dead but then it headed into the rocks. Using the leverage of the long rod, I lifted up and out, clamped down on the spool and it gave just enough ground to come clear.

Paul swished the net into the right place and it was done. Four point seven kilos, just over the magical ten pound mark and boy was I stoked. I’d been trying to unlock the key to buffalo bream for years and, while I won’t tell you it was easy, nor that I’m a world authority now, it sure was satisfying to achieve this strange fishing goal.

I’m still addicted to buffies even now, 6 months on from that day. In fact, we fish for buff more than any other fish from shore because where else are you going to find ten pound terrors only a few feet from any rockwall in Perth that fight harder than even a salmon?

Nowhere, that’s where.