Beach mulloway is one of the hardest single-fish targets in Australian land-based fishing — a dusk-to-dawn waiting game played in changing surf gutters with bait soaks measured in hours. CalsFishin has built an entire YouTube series around the public chase, and episode one is a refreshingly honest opener that lays out the gulf between the angler's current position and the 100 cm trophy mark.
"We're fishing off the beach, hoping for a mulloway," the host said in the cold open. "I've only ever caught one mulloway in my life. That was last week and it was about 30 cm."
The gear rundown that followed is the kind of tackle-shop honesty most fishing channels skip.
"For the lighter setup, we got the 6K Saragosa Bull with 30 lb. And then we just pair that with this Shimano Aero Wave 5 to 8 kilo surf rod. So that's more for picking up the tailor and stuff. Gang hooks on that three-way swivel down to a sinker. Pretty standard stuff. This one — it's a lighter setup, but it always hooks the bigger fish."
The heavy outfit was an Aventus Shore Game paired with a 6.5K Penn Slammer running 50 lb braid and a heavier 60 lb leader, baited initially with a snail and later swapped to a live tailor.
CalsFishin was upfront about the calibration challenge.
"By no means am I saying they're the best rigs you should be running for mulloway and whatever else like that. But it's something that I'm still learning. So that's why we're making this series — because we're going to be learning new skills along the way to see what works best when targeting mulloway."
"First rod just went absolutely off. It was a decent fish. As soon as I tightened up, the hook pulled."
A 45 to 46 cm tailor came in next on the lighter outfit and was iced for dinner — eaten on the beach with steak.
The loudest fish of the night turned out to be a shovel-nose ray hooked on the lighter outfit, dragging line straight at the rocks and outpulling everything else the team encountered.
"I've caught shovel-nose bigger than that, but that was the strongest by far," CalsFishin said. The leader broke at the moment of landing — a detail series-driven content captures because the camera is rolling and the failure isn't edited out.
From there, the night was a sequence of bust-offs against what the team strongly suspected were sharks running the same gutter. A live herring on the heavy outfit went screaming on a long run before a clean 60 lb leader cut.
"Got absolutely smoked by a shark on this one. Snapped off there."
The pre-dawn restart pulled the same result almost immediately.
"Just got sharked or monster-tailored again. I saw just one hit on the rod, one pull, and then it's just straight through that 60 lb leader."
For any angler running 60 lb on the assumption it'll handle anything that swims off an east-coast surf beach, that's the practical data point worth taking. Mulloway anglers serious about the metre mark are increasingly stepping up to 80 lb fluorocarbon shock leaders specifically because shark traffic has compressed the available bait window between dusk and dawn.
The series framing is that the journey itself is the content.
"I'm learning something every session and eventually we'll have to get one surely."
With a 30 cm personal best, two recent bust-offs and a shovel-nose to show for the season's opening session, the metre mark is some way off — but the public, episode-by-episode chase is exactly the format that turns a learner into a beach mulloway specialist on camera, and there are now enough viewers logging the same losses on the same gutters to make the whole thing a community problem rather than an individual one.