Seaway Quick Report Thursday 14th July 2011

Moved into the seaway at 3.30am(sleep in!), plan was to see if some Tarpon were around, if not move back into the broadwater.  I picked a likely location and set to it.  First cast..nothing.  Second cast.. a bump..interesting.  Third cast..a  hookup and a good fight with the fish jumping off next to the boat.  Now that I knew they were around, I added a 30cm 50lb clip on leader and changed plastic to a squidgy slick rig 65mm. Next cast, hookup and Tarpon landed in the high 50's.  Over the next half hour I landed 4 more Tarpon and jumped off at least twice that many.  Now that I had a hungry school of Tarpon that was hitting plastics on every cast I wanted to see if I could tempt them into taking a different type of lure.  Plan was to use a certain type of lure for 5 casts then if no hits or fish to change back to the plastic, catch a fish then change to a different type of lure and so on.  I tried minnows(rapala XRD 10, & XR8, manns stretch 5), vibs (zipbaits vib80-25g & vib 58-13g), slugs (gillies baitfish 15 & 25g)  & poppers( rapala skitter pop 90 & zipbaits ZBL popper).  The only lure out of that lot that even got a hit was the gillies 15g baitfish and that was only one hit, no hookups.  Everytime I changed back to the plastic, on the first cast I got a hookup and a jumpoff or a fish landed.  Just goes to show how fussy they can be, if you don't have what they want you will struggle.  I was also testing a new plastic today, a slider in the pearl colour, which the Tarpon really liked but they only lasted one or two fish.

Anyway dawn arrived and the Tarpon went off the bite, I moved to the north wall flats and threw around a vision 110 and picked up a tailor around 40cm, had a few more hits but no hookups.  Drifting around the end of the wall I had multiple hits  on the vision and a few short lived hookups.  I switched to a pearl slider on a 3/8th oz jighead and from then on it was a hookup every cast on small Giant Trevally around 35-40cm, they were very aggressive smashing the plastic while it was still sinking and over the next hour or so managed 13 GT's and 2 Bigeyes all around the same size.  Not monsters but fun nonetheless.  As the sun rose they went off the bite so I went for a quick look in the broadwater and then went offshore looking for tuna.  Found one school and chased them for a while but couldn't tempt them.   One more look around the broadwater and back to the ramp at around 9am.

Water is very clear at the moment with around 7 metres of visability.   Sliders worked well but they are quite fragile often lasting only 2 fish, I'll keep a packet or two though, the fish seem to like them.