Fishing and Aetherial Reduction: Any Tips?

Hello there, fellow fishers.

After leveling my miner and botanist to 60 a little more than a week ago, I was overjoyed to see how aetherial reduction remedied my need for gathering crystals and clusters. For the most part. I still needed a way to gather more water crystals, and so I set out to level my fisher to 60.

Now that I'm here, I've done a little looking around for which collectible fish are required, but I can't help but feel fishers are at a disadvantage. As a botanist or miner, it's fairly simple to swiftly move between nodes and collect a sizable amount of crystals in a short amount of time. With fisher, however, the window where collectible fish can be caught is very small, and I'm lucky to catch even three in that time.

I can only assume my gear is insufficient (although it seems more than enough for botanist and miner) ,or I'm not using my skills as I should.

So to my fellow fishers: how do you go about fishing up collectibles for aetherial reduction?

Also, if it helps here are my stats.

Gathering - 488
Perception - 388
GP - 599

Using HQ 60 gear on my left side, and HQ 50 gear with materia on my right.

Any tips would be greatly appreciate.

As a Fisher looking for water crystals, you have two readily available options : Caiman and Thaliak Caiman. Caiman are available from 6PM-9PM in Voor Sian Siran and The Iron Feast, while Thaliak Caiman are available from 3PM-5PM in Middle Thaliak River. In all three cases, they're mooched, most easily either from Blueclaw Shrimp (at The Iron Feast) or Bullfrogs (Voor Sian Siran and Middle Thaliak River).

There are two tricks. First, you can choose a bait that focuses on the mooched fish. Blueclaw Shrimp are the only fish at The Iron Feast that will bite on stonefly nymphs, while Bladed Steel Jigs get Bullfrogs more than half the time.

The second is to boost your HQ rate as high as possible. Perception food helps, but more important is use of the Patience (or Patience II) skill. Don't waste Hooksets on the Bullfrogs/Shrimp, but you'll want to do so on the mooch. (I'm pretty sure powerful hookset for both.)