Seaway Report Friday 7th October 2011

Into the seaway at 1am, I started off as usual by looking for Tarpon.   Took a while to find them but find them I did, not big numbers and needed a quite a few casts for each fish but landed 5 and lost 3 all between 55 and 60cm.  Was trying some new plastics today, Zman 3" streakz and 4" curly tails.  The 3" streakz worked okay but they weren't interested in the curly tails.  The ecogear grass minnow is still worked better though.  Anyway after an hour of that they went off the bite which was odd, usually when that happens there's a reason such as a tide change or sunrise.  This time there didn't seem to be a reason for it.  Anyway I left the seaway and headed into the broadwater to see if I could get some pike for dawn, I dropped a couple but all I could land were small tailor.

Back to the seaway for dawn I fished around the north wall with twisties, poppers, minnows and plastics but that yielded nothing which was surpising as the water looked very good.  I moved down to the pipeline and tried dropping plastics and twisties down along it.  A school of about 20 small yellowtail kingfish followed up a plastic and swam around the boat for 5 minutes and I managed to hook the runt of the litter on a pearl gulp which after a feisty fight went 53cm.  His mates hung around for most of the fight then disappeared as I brought him on board.  I couldn't find them again and spent some more time fishing around the pipeline but got nothing.

Decided to give up on the lures and headed off to get a few pike, I managed 3 fairly quickly and as it was the runout tide I didn't want to spend hours catching heaps only to have no interest so I headed back to the seaway with those.  I had some new heavier traces this time with 100lb black magic mono, 60lb wire & 8/0 hooks, there's some big fish down there and I'm sick of losing them so I've decided to beef up all my livebaiting gear.   The first one only lasted a few minutes and the heavy gear knocked it over in about 30 seconds, a jewie of 79cm.   The next pike was down for the next half hour in various spots, pipeline, south wall and nothing even looked at it.  It died.  Back to the deep hole with my last livie, it got munched and all I was left with was the tail.  I only had the one dead one left so I butterflied it and sent it back down, it got hit within minutes and I hooked up on another good fish.     This was a tailor and a good one at that coming in at 69cm, bit of a skinny fish though and he had a recent wound near the tail, looks like a spear wound to me.  That was it for there, I spent a bit of time trolling around wavebreak and caught some more small tailor and flathead and was back at the ramp by 9am.

Not heaps of fish today and some interesting behaviour there, could be the small tidal flow was having an effect.  Good to see the yellowtail kings there in numbers even if they are small.  Water temps are still around 20 degrees, water visibility was high almost 5 metres at the top of the tide though it reduced quickly once the tide started to run out.