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I have been fortunate to have opportunities to cycle through a wide range of fishing techniques.

When I was a pre-teen and still at school, we lived on the shore of Lake in Lake Illawarra just south of Wollongong in NSW where I bait fished with mates mainly for bream and flathead. By the time I was in my teens I had progressed to fishing from canoes and small timber boats and in my early working years I purchased my first fiberglass boat and progressed to fishing offshore Wollongong waters for all manner of salt water species.

In the 70’s I decided to add to my fishing skills and to take up fly fishing and I joined the Illawarra Fly Fishing Club (IFF). Being a club person, and with developing commercial and management skills, it was not long until I joined the management committee and a couple of years later took on the IFF President’s role. My experiences with IFF changed my fishing perspective completely and we even purchased a holiday home on the shores of Lake Jindabyne so I could further develop my fly fishing for trout skill set. In 1999 I was invited through IFF to attend as a boat controller the World Fly Fishing Championships that was to be based in Jindabyne. Waters for the 1999 World Fly Fishing Championships were fisheries I knew well and included Lakes Jindabyne and Eucumbene and the best of our local streams. I already knew, from my local fishing, a couple of local “gun” fly fisher who were competing at the Worlds and was introduced to the other team members and some other members of Fly Fish Australia who were involved in running or like me were controlling in the competition. The whole “Worlds” experience was fantastic and I joined FFA not long after that and I was asked to take on the role of Treasurer for the NSW Chapter of FFA. Soon after that I also joined the National Committee of FFA as Treasurer of the national body of FFA. My fly fishing skills also developed and in 1994 I was selected to represent NSW at the National Fly Fishing Championships in Tasmania. At that competition FFA NSW had its AGM and I was elected President of FFA NSW Chapter. My involvement on the NSW Chapter and National body of FFA intensified and in 2004 members of the National body asked me to take on the role of President of FFA. I accepted that role and was at the coal face of FFA for 13 years until I retired in 2016. I am still a member of IFF and a Life Member of FFA but these days my involvement by choice is from the outside looking in.

In 2013 we moved to Gladstone Central Qld (CQ) for family reasons and that unfortunately took me away from my much loved fresh water trout fly fishing waters.
Once we moved to Central Queensland I quickly realized it’s not always practical to fishonfly in Gladstone in particular or Queensland in general … strong winds and big fast tidal runs can just stop it being fun and unfortunately there are very few people up here that either fly fish or fly tie. So with limited fly fishing options that gave me plenty of free fishing time to indulge in what became my then fishing passion which is to fishonlure particularly with soft plastics. Surprisingly much of what I experience and learn when fishing on that “dark side” finds its way into my fly designs and how I tie and fish flies … hence the inclusion of some of that information in this web site. The inverse also applies with snippets of what I lean fishing on the "dark side" influencing new fly designs leading me to improve existing fly recopies.

Probably the biggest element of fly fishing and fly tying that I missed when we moved from fresh water trout country to Gladstone was having enough opportunities to fly fish or to tie flies. That gave me plenty of time to establish a comprehensive ranges of flies for my Central Queensland fly fishing opportunities, time to review and update my flies for other Australian native species including Barra, Bass and Saratoga but there was still a gap ... I missed in particular making a fly and then heading out and catching a fish.

In 2019 I decided to compete in the Awoonga Open Fishing Championships with my now great mate Scott. Scott has as a fantastic "dark side" pedigree and he has been very generous in sharing information with me and has help me develop my "dark side" fishing skills. I am still serving my apprenticeship in that regard but that competition was life changing and has helped my fill the gap I mentioned above.
In that competition Scott gave me a soft plastic to try and it worked a dream for me and I caught 4 out of the 9 fish for our two man team and our team finished the comp with 5th place out of 30 teams for that competition.
It turned out that soft plastic was called a "Hammer" and unfortunately, they became unavailable in the early days of Covid 19. Not to be daunted by that, I decided to work out how to make soft plastics and to develop my own "top pour soft plastics". That process has had many iterations and progressively developed into a slightly thinner more gar fish like soft plastic ... garfish are a popular food sources for both salt and impoundment barramundi and I called that soft plastic my Alpha Gar.
That was the start in my passion for making top pour soft plastics. That has filled the gap that moving from the trout waters of the Snowy Mountains and consequently competition trout fishing and recreational trout fly fishing ... there are so many new "dark side" fishing opportunities, techniques and baits (particularly soft plastic) that I can dedicate my time and activities to consider.

Having said that I still find time to fly fish local waters when tides and at this stage I have successfully landed some 39 different of CQ fish on fly.

My most recent fishing project has been the development of a technique that I call “Micro baiting with Vibes”. This is turning out to be an exciting type of fishing and I’ll detail that in a future posts.

Tight lines to all,
Regards Chatto

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