Seaway and Inshore Report 23rd March 2011

Conditions

• Wind: NW  5-15  knots
• Preceeding 3 Days Wind : SE-NW 5-15 knots
• Swell: 0.5 m ESE Swell
• Water Clarity 0.5-1m
• Tide : BOM: Low tide at 04.49 am, High tide at 04.49am  ( 0.16-1.28)
• Time Fished: 02.00am to 10.00am
• Moon Phase: 3 days before first Quarter.
• Barometer 1002.6-1005.6
• Water Temp 25.9-26.8 Degrees C

Notes

Mainly sunny. Lots of schools of frogmouth pilchards offshore and entering seaway during the run-in tide.  Mack Tuna close inshore, some other fish were hitting the bait but not sure what they were, big though.

Report

Moved into the seaway at 2.00am, first up I wanted to try for a Tarpon.  The moon was up and I've never had any luck on clear moonlit nights especially with Tarpon and today was no exception.  I found some likely looking shows on the sounder but I couldn't get them to eat anything. Give me overcast with a bit of rain anyday.   Tried a number of techniques for a couple of hours before heading back to the wavebreak flats to do some rerigging.  While I was there some bigeyes popped up and started hitting bait on the surface, first cast with a ZBL popper and they were all over it.  Not huge fish with the average around 40cm but nice to get some fish in the boat, I managed about 10 of those before they stopped.

By that time first light was showing, rather than lure fish the end of the wall which at the bottom of the tide is usually a waste of time anyway I headed offshore to the bait reefs.  I had two reasons for doing that.  First reason was I wanted to get some yellowtail for livies to see how they compare to live pike and secondly I wanted to be out there when the tuna first came up.  Wasn't long before the yellowtail came on the bite and I soon had about 15 or so swimming in the livewell, at that time I was distracted by the tuna smashing into bait on the surface.   I chased them around for an hour landing 6 mack tuna from 60-68cm on a 40gram raider.  There were bigger fish in there though, some of the surface hits looked like bombs hitting the water.  I worked my way back to the seaway casting at all the schools landing a few fish, some schools were right in close, some even came in the mouth of the seaway.

Back at the seaway the tide had just started to run in. First drop with a yellowtail landed a tailor around 45cm, then a small jewie around 55cm.   Then I got distracted with some bustups hard up against the south wall, they were balling up bait and smashing them in close to the rocks.  Turned out these were schools of bigeye trevally and casting a 10gram gillies at them it was a fish a cast, fish weren't huge average size would have been 35cm with the odd bigger fish up to 45cm.

I left them to it and went back to livebaiting, by this time the run in was in full force and it was impossible to fish near the eddy or the dropoff.  I tried out a bit further where the current was less severe and found a big show on the sounder.  First drop yielded a 53cm Giant Trevally.   The next 8 drops all yielded GT's the biggest coming in at 68cm, 2 64cm fish with the rest between 50 and 60cm.  Action packed fishing at its finest and those big GT's were damn hard work.  The last two yellowtail yielded one more tailor at 55cm and 1 more jewie at 55cm.  By this time it was 10.00am and I gave it away for the day.

So another good day despite the slow start, the amount of bait and fish around at the moment is incredible.  Yellowtail obviously work fine as a livie and the hookup rate seems to be a bit better than pike.  Only two were put out that didn't result in a hookup.  The mix of lure fishing and livebaiting definitely maximises your fishing time and results, especially once the sun is up.