Seaway and Broadwater Quick Report Friday 30th April

Just a quick report on Fridays effort.  Bad weather once again with a 2-2.5m SE swell and some strong SW-S winds.  Did rain a bit early but that cleared off with the sunrise.  My timing was a bit off today and as a result I faired pretty badly.  I managed 2 pike before sunrise and then moved into the seaway just as the sky began to lighten.   Tried drifting unweighted pike over the pipeline for zip then moved up to the north wall.  The swell was huge but it was okay to fish(very challenging though) as long as the tide was coming in.  First cast with a unweighted live pike in close to the wall got eaten  by a good tailor which proceeded to get airborne, unfortunately I had forgotten to change rigs and was using mono straight through and of course he cut the line between the first and second hook.  A new rig this time with wire was cast in and he landed in the eddy about 5 metres back from the end of the wall.  He got eaten within about 30 seconds and the fish took off like a rocket, unfortunately he took off around the front of the wall heading north while the tide and swell was dragging me back in the seaway.   After pulling about 50 metres of line off I felt the line dragging over the rocks and then pop.... gone.  Not much I could have done there, just too rough to be fighting a fish and controlling the boat at the same time.  I tried casting lures around the walls for a bit further back in the seaway where I could actually stand up for a while but that yielded nothing so I went off to get more livies.

Even the pike weren't interested today and it took ages to just get 4 in the well, but I did pick up a couple of flathead in the 40cm range and a couple of small reefie types, a small spangled emperor and a lancer.  I tried drifting the flats  for a while, saw the occasional surface hit but didn't see any kings.   Went back to the seaway and tried livebaiting the pipeline for a while.  That yielded nothing so gave it away at 9am.

Bif of a difficult day today though some of it was my fault, got on the water late for a start.  Casting unweighted pike around the north wall has alot of potential though, hopefully I'll actually get some decent conditions to try it out on soon.  Water temps conitnue to slide being around 23-23.5 degrees.  No pics today.