Beach mulloway is one of the hardest single-fish targets in Australian land-based fishing, and CalsFishin has built an entire YouTube series around the public chase. Episode one — released as a one-overnight surf session — is a refreshingly honest opener that admits, in the cold open, just how distant the headline goal still is.
"We're fishing off the beach, hoping for a mulloway," the host says, flagging that the series is called The Hunt for a Metre Mulloway. "I've only ever caught one mulloway in my life. That was last week and it was about 30 cm."
The gear rundown that follows is the kind of tackle-shop honesty most fishing channels skip. CalsFishin walked through both setups in detail.
"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.
"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."
The overnight ran exactly the way a learning curve should. After hours of soaking baits, the first hot run came mid-conversation.
"First rod just went absolutely off. It was a decent fish. As soon as I tightened up, the hook pulled."
The headline fish of the night was not a mulloway at all. The lighter outfit loaded up to the rocks with a fish CalsFishin still rates as the strongest shovel-nose ray he has ever hooked, even though he has caught bigger.
"I've caught shovel-nose bigger than that, but that was the strongest by far," he said.
The leader broke at the moment of landing — the kind of 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 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 anyone running 60 lb on the assumption it'll handle anything that swims off an east-coast surf beach, that's the 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.
CalsFishin's framing for the rest of the series is that the journey itself is the content.
"It will help us out and hopefully we can get out there more often and keep chasing these fish — because 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, the metre mark is some way off — but the public, episode-by-episode chase is exactly the format that will turn a learner into a beach mulloway specialist on camera.