Seaway Report Friday 3rd February 2012

Firstly apologies for the lack of posts so far this year, it has been difficult to get out on the water.  As I can no longer get out on the water for my usual time of between 2am and 9am I'll be trying a few different times.  Early evening, overnight and might even try a middle of the day fish if the tides are right.

Finally managed to get out for a quick fish this morning, on the water at 2am we were greeted by a stiff 20kt SE breeze just to make things extra difficult.  Swell was 1 metre from the East and the seaway was lumpy.  Moved into the seaway to have a look around, as its been a few weeks since I was in there and the floods have come through since then I wanted to spend some time sounding around to see where the fish were holding.  There were plenty of fish on the sounder in most locations in fact more than I've seen for a while.  Started off with ecogear grass minnows on 3/8 oz jigheads and started to work the edges.  Didn't take long before dad hooked a big fish which proceeded to make a beeline for the rocks and promptly busted him off.  I was next and this time landed a nice bigeye around 55cm, had a few more hits and landed a small stingray but nothing too exciting so we switched to poppers and dad landed another bigeye at around 45cm.  Quiet for a while then I tried some trolling with a special rig I'll be trialling over the next few months(more on that one later)had 2 good strikes but hooks pulled on both of them as I was using single hooks.  I'll change back to trebles and see how it goes.  Anyway dawn arrived and we started working the edges but it was quiet on that front, only a couple of hookups but no fish landed.  Dropped some plastics to the bottom and dad got a jewie in the 60's.  Saw some fish feeding at the front of the north wall which turned out to be more bigeyes in the 40-50cm range, landed a couple each before we had to leave at 6am.

Water temp was between 25.5 & 25.8 degrees, water quality was ok visbility was about a metre at the top of the tide but its very dirty from the 2nd half of the run out to the 2nd half of the run in.   Water colour was a dirty green colour at the top of the tide.  Didn't see much bait around, but did notice quite a few eagle rays feeding on bait close to the rocks.  We didn't get enough time to try any different techniques today, but there's alot of fish in the seaway at the moment so if you can crack the pattern you may do well.