Seaway Report Monday 27th February 2012

An opportunity arose to fish monday morning in my usual hours so I jumped on it, despite the fact that the wind was still howling from the east, the swell was up nudging 3 metres, it was the bottom of the tide and the weekends rain had once again turned the rivers into a liquid brown torrent.  Knowing all that I knew it would be a tough day out on the water but decided to go anyway.  Into the seaway at 5am, as expected the water was very dirty with visibilty down to about 30cm.  We tried plastics, metals and minnows around the pipeline and walls but didn't even get a hit.

So I decided to try and get some livies for the run in tide, we managed that fairly quickly but only kept half a dozen herring and about the same number of sand mullet in the 20-25cm range as I don't like to keep too many livies incase the fish are not interested on the day.  First down was the sand mullet in the hope of a decent jewie in the dirty water.  We drifted those things for at least an hour around the walls and pipeline and didn't get a hit so we switched to herring.  Now I'll say I haven't been a big fan of using live herring in the seaway up to this point as I think they are a bit small, I've always preferred pike or yellowtail.   After today I might use them a bit more often.  The first few drifts yielded nothing so we moved to a new spot  and dad immediately hooked and landed a nice GT around 50cm.  We moved slightly to get a better drift and I picked a small jewie around 50cm.  Next drift we had a double hookup and my jewie got chomped on the way up, obviously a few sharks around. Dad landed his, a jewie of around 55cm.  We had run out of herring so we motored back and on the second throw with the cast net scored a jackpot of 30+herring.

Back to the seaway we began one of the most awesome sessions I've had, for the next hour and a half nearly every drop was a double hookup on fish.  GT's up to 57cm, more small jewies up to 60cm and a lone flathead at 73cm.  We lost at least as many as we landed and the sharks got a couple of fish as well.  We had a 2m+ whaler follow a jewie to the surface and at the last minute as the fish was 2 metres away from the boat the shark  made a last ditch charge to grab him and actually came out of the water... awesome to watch but he missed his meal.  The fish of the day came towards the end of the trip when on yet another double hookup, mine took off like a rocket and just kept going, definitely a good fish and far better than anything else landed so far that day.  After a solid fight out of the gloom a nice golden trevally materialised, now I've seen a few small specimens caught in the seaway by other boats but this was definitely a first for me  and a quality fish at that.  After a few more minutes of dogged fighting under the boat I netted a beautiful 64cm Golden Trevally.  Definitely fish of the year so far for me.  We landed a few more GT's and jewies before we ran out of bait again at around 11am and called it a day.  Overall we landed 8 GT's from 50-57cm, 10 jewies from 48-60cm, 1 flathead @73cm and  1 golden trevally at 64cm

Definitely the best day fishing I've had in the seaway so far this year, I think the dirty water helped make the fish less skittish than they usually are and willing to stay on the bite for a longer period.  The dirty brown water only stayed around for the bottom half of the run out tide, An hour after the start of the run in green water replaced it and cleaner water was not far offshore towards the top of the tide.  Give it a couple of weeks and it should be back to normal.  Water temps were aroun 24.5 -24.9 degrees so its dropped a couple of degrees with the rain runoff.