Seaway and Inshore Report Wednesday 31st August 2011

Moved into the seaway at 2.30am, I wanted to see if I could find any Tarpon first.  First cast I got nudged and Dad hooked up with the fish tossing the plastic on the first jump.  That was promising so we continued to cast in the general area but the fish were timid to start with with most casts getting hits and nudges but no hookups although Dad picked up a small jewie around 45cm.  After an hour of that we managed to stir them up enough so that they finally started to hit the lures properly and we started hooking some Tarpon.  Size was good with the smallest fish going 58cm and the biggest a slab sided fish of 65cm.  We landed 7 overall and lost about 15 from jumpoffs which is a pretty good conversion rate.

As dawn arrived they disappeared and we changed tactics, we started off using minnows around the edges of the walls but that yielded nothing so we switched to metals.  With one long cast into the shore break on the north wall flats with a 20gram twistie dad hooked a good fish which immediately jumped out of the water showing itself to be a good salmon, after a good tussle it was landed, it went 66cm.  We fished around the walls for a bit longer before moving back into the broadwater looking for any surface action.  There was none so we ended up back at the seaway and checked out the south wall, while there was a ton of fish on the southern side they weren't eating.

We decided to head north along the shore break of south straddie and look for some tuna.  It didn't take long to find schools of 10 or so fish and after a couple of attempts I managed to hook a decent fish on a Gillies 25gm Baitfish which proceeded to take about 150m of line in its first run, a 15 minute battle and I had a 80cm Mack Tuna at the boat.  We chased the schools around for a while hooking and losing a few fish before dad hooked another fish, after a good battle he landed a nice fish around 60cm.  We chased them around for a bit longer but they were quite difficult to get close to so we gave up and headed back to the broadwater and had another run around looking for birds or fish on surface.  We covered alot of ground but saw none so we gave it away at around 9.30am.

A pretty good day overall, but a bit disappointed with the lack of surface action in the broadwater.   There is tons of bait holding just outside the surf break on south straddie so it should be a good spot to look for fish when the conditions are calm enough.  Water temps were rock steady around 19.9-20 degrees.  Should be a great pelagic season with such high water temps already.