Seaway Report Friday 25th February 2011

Conditions

• Wind: SW  5-10  knots
• Preceeding 3 Days Wind : SE 10-20 knots
• Swell: 1.5 m SE Swell
• Water Clarity 1-1.5m
• Tide : BOM: Low tide at 08.33 pm, High tide at 01.59am  ( 0.47-1.39)
• Time Fished: 03.30am to 08.00am
• Moon Phase: day of the last quarter.
• Barometer 1013.7-1014.9
• Water Temp 23.8-26.1 Degrees C

Notes

Some clouds mainly sunny. Water quality was excellent in all areas even at the bottom of the tide.  Lots of sharks around.  Lots of bait holding in the seaway. Lots of trevally around the pipeline.

Report

We moved into the seaway at 3.30am and straight away found some active bigeye trevally, they weren't really going for it just hitting the surface every now and again.  We used poppers and 30gram twisties and landed 4 bigeyes from 57 -62cm before they shut down.  We moved up to the north wall for dawn and started off with shallow minnows(megabass vision 110) around the edges, wasn't long before we started landing some small bigeyes up to 45cm and a lone tailor at 47cm.

We fished for about an hour with lures before deciding to go and get some livies, half an hour later we were back and from then on it was action packed fishing at its finest.  Big fish were hooked, some landed, some eaten, many lost though we think some of the ones lost were sharks going by the abraded traces they left behind.  The fish we did land though were excellent quality.  2 Gt's 59 & 61cm, 2 jewies 57& 63cm, 3 tailor 48-55cm with a couple of good fish escaping close to the boat, one of which was a 60cm+ tailor.

After a while we ran out of livies but I had kept 1 dead pike  for a very special reason.  I rigged up with a 40lb wire trace, butterflied him and sent him down.  Minutes later he was eaten and the fish took off, unfortunately right in the direction of the breaking swells across the seaway entrance .  An epic fight ensued and about 30 minutes and 1km later we had a 2m+ whaler shark at the boat.  Just goes to show the size of the sharks that have been stealing the fish and livies, and its certainly big enough to take a chunk out of a surfer or two.   I wasn't going to bring a shark that big into the boat to take the hook out so I let him go by cutting the trace.  We gave it away after that, quite happy with the days catch.

So overall another top day with some quality fish and my personal best GT and my biggest whaler shark yet.  The SE winds continue to bring lots of bait and good fish into the seaway. Livies continue to impress with the quality of fish caught.