Seaway Report Thursday 17th February

Conditions

• Wind: ESE  5-10  knots
• Preceeding 3 Days Wind : SE 10-15 knots
• Swell: 1.5 m SE Swell
• Water Clarity 0.5-1.5m
• Tide : BOM: Low tide at 13.51 pm, High tide at 07.28am  ( 0.04-1.74)
• Time Fished: 04.00am to 09.30am
• Moon Phase: 1 day before full moon.
• Barometer 1014.4-1015.1
• Water Temp 26.2-26.9 Degrees C

Notes

Some showers and rain, occasional sunny patches. Too rough to go offshore. Water quality was good but the north wall had alot of suspened sand early, which cleaned up towards the top of the tide. Too rough to fish the north wall during the runout.

Report

Went for a fish on thursday morning, more of a test fish to try out some livebaiting and see if the modified rig I put together worked or not.  Its been 4 years since I've livebaited the seaway so wasn't sure if the whole system of catching livebait, storing livebait and fishing livebait worked ok.

We started off with lures though, conditions were once again very rough but we persisted catching some nice bigeyes around the 50-55cm mark and a few nice dart which surprisingly weren't shy about hitting a 11cm minnow.  Water around the north wall had alot of suspended sand initially but it cleared up as the tide rose.
Once the fish went off the bite we moved off to try and locate some livebaits, that didn't take long and we soon had 10 pike ranging from 20cm up to 45cm monsters.  First problem was that there was a short on the pump system somewhere and I ended up getting shocks every time I put my hand in the water so we took that out and just changed the water every so often.  Second problem was because it was so rough the livewell(big plastic box) ended up leaking half its water into the boat, had to use the bilge pump a few times.  I'll be out looking for a better livewell and aeration system today.
Anyway onto the fishing, I'd modified the rig i used to use to make it a bit more flexible and I sent down the first pike, took about 5 seconds before he got eaten by a good fish, which unfortunately cut through the trace between the first and second hook.  I had made up some rigs I wanted to test just for that eventuality, as they have light wire just between the first and second hook.   Second pike I sent down got eaten straight away and after a short tussle had a nice tailor to the boat, as you can see in the pic they do have a tendency to chop baits in half.  Anyway over the next 20 minutes we landed 2 jewies 57 & 64cm, 1 GT at 48cm & 1 Bigeye at 55cm.   The smaller pike were eaten instantly but the larger ones were left untouched, I'm thinking I might restrict the use of the larger ones to night time and first light when the bigger fish are on the hunt.  We soon ran out of livies and went back for some more, about 20 minutes later we were back with another 10 pike.  It was too rough to fish the north wall so we tried around the pipeline and I soon hooked up on another fish, this one was big and had the drag screaming unfortunately about 10 minutes into the fight he cut me off on the pipeline, probably a kingfish.  Hooked up another fish soon after which also busted me off on the pipeline..grrrr. We did see another boat land a kingie of around 65cm so they were definitely there.   Next fish I hooked wasn't anywhere near as strong and up popped another bigeye around 55cm.  Lost the next two fish as well and our time was up so we gave it away for the day.

So a pretty good day overall, a few problems with the livewell system but that should soon be fixed. Plenty of fish around with live baits getting eaten within minutes.  The bad midweek conditions continue to frustrate though.