Broadwater, Seaway and Inshore Report Monday 4th July 2011

Conditions

• Wind: SW – 5-10 knots
• Preceeding 3 Days Wind : S- SE  5-15 knots
• Swell: 1 m ESE Swell
• Water Clarity 1.5-4m
• Tide : BOM: Low tide at 04.43 am, High tide at 12.21am  ( 0.24-1.53)
• Time Fished: 1.00am to 09.00am
• Moon Phase: 3 days after new moon.
• Barometer 1020.3-1021.8
• Water Temp 17.7-18.9 Degrees C

Notes

No clouds, sunny. Clear water.  White pilchard schools close to The Grand boat ramp & spit barges.  No surface feeding while we were there, some salmon feeding between 8 & 8.30am.

Report

We started off in the broadwater at 1.00am, I had one spot in mind, a fairly shallow area about 3-4m with good structure and usually holds alot of bait.  Due to the shallow depth the fish usually hunt close to the surface so the lure of choice was a megabass vision 110, a shallow running twitching minnow.  Second cast and I was on with a hard fighting fish with a few good runs.  Turned out to be a 55cm Tailor, which set the scene for the next hour with another dozen or so tailor coming to the boat all high 40's low 50's so good quality fish.  Moving around a bit we also managed a bigeye trev around 40cm and a GT at 35cm which was the first GT I've ever caught at night.  We lost a few other fish and then as so often happens at this spot they went off the bite.

We moved into the seaway at around 3am and spent some time looking for Tarpon.  The usual spots were vacant and it wasn't until I put one cast into a new spot that I hooked one which wore through the trace at the side of the boat.  Now that I had a likely location, I just had to figure out how they wanted the lures presented, and the best weight combination.  Some more casting with a couple of different setups and I hooked the next fish and I managed to land this one just as the trace snapped, it went 62cm.  I had been using 20lb leader, but thats not sufficient for Tarpon as the previous 2 fish showed so I switched to a modular rig I wanted to test(basically a 30cm bit of 40lb mono with a swivel on one end and a clip on the other).   With the weight and angles sorted we started hooking them on every cast and over the next couple of hours saw some of the most action packed Tarpon fishing I've ever experienced.  Every cast was a hit, a hookup with a jumpoff or a Tarpon landed.  Double hookups were common.  The size of the fish was exceptional as well, only one fish landed was below 60cm, the rest between 60& 64cm.  Some excellent fights too with a good mix of runners and jumpers, with some awesome runs mixed in with metre high aerial displays.  Top fun.  14 Tarpon were landed, lost count of the number of hookups but it would have been well over 40.   A number of different soft plastics were tried including Ecogear Grass minnow's, Squidgy Fish, Squidgy 65mm Slick Rigs and gulp minnows all worked well.  They went off the bite just before the sun rose.

We spent some time luring the ends of the rock walls but only ended up with one small bigeye to show for it.  Had a quick look around in the broadwater for any surface action but there was nothing there so we went out the seaway and headed north along south straddie just outside the shore break looking for tuna.  We found a small school about 1k up and dad hooked and landed one around 60cm on a 25gram gillies after a good fight.  We chased them around for another hour or so without luck  before heading back in.  Back at the ramp, apparently the salmon had showed up feeding on surface near the grand ramp about 30 minutes beforehand and had gone down about 10 minutes before we arrived.  We waited for another half hour but they didn't resurface so we called it a day.

Oh Well pretty damn good day anyway without the salmon, plenty of fish landed with lots of action.