Rainy Seaway Report Thursday 24th November 2011

Into the seaway at 3.30am, I knew the conditions would be a bit challenging but wanted to see if the tailor would bite for a bit longer during rainy heavy overcast conditions. Pretty much started raining as soon as we arrived and didn't stop until just after we left. Swell was about a metre coming from the north east which made fishing the northern side of the north wall  difficult.  Water quality was poor with visibility less than a metre but that did improve towards the top of the tide.  Wind was a bit strong from the south to start with but eased off as the day progressed.  Once we had a bit of light to work with we started catching tailor, a mix of sizes from 20cm rats to 50+cm fish with most hits coming about 2 metres away from the rocks.
The fishing was consistent but not frantic, we still had to work a bit for them. Water was dirty so we used a vision 110 in the moon glow colour, did try the xr10 at first but they weren't interested in that, towards the end of the morning as the water cleared the xr10 caught a few fish but the vision was the lure for the day. Unfortunately one big fish decided to keep it for himself.  We did try poppers a few times but they weren't interested in those, rain might have put them off. They bit steadily until about 8am then switched off as the tide slowed. We tried some plastics on the bottom but only had the tails bitten off by small tailor.  Overall we landed over 20 fish with about half of those going over 50cm, biggest fish went 57cm. Also got a 40cm mackerel on a xr10 near the top of the tide, first one I've caught on the southern side of the wall.

Had a look north of wavebreak but there was little around, a few small bait schools.  There does seem to be alot of injured tailor this year, far more than I've seen in previous years, I'd say the sharks must have been thick up at fraser this year.

Water temps 21.3-24.5 degrees