Seaway and Inshore Report Saturday 19th May 2012

Into the seaway at around 2am, early because I wanted to fish the first of the run in tide around 3am.  The first hour was slow with nothing but as the tide turned things improved.  Dad was first up with a fish following and hitting the lure all the way back to the boat, he hooked up with the lure only a couple of meters away from the boat and the fish blasted away at top speed.. unfortunately it beelined right back to the rock wall 30m away and busted him off in about 10 seconds.  Not much you can do about that, the gear we are using(6-8lb) is not strong enough to stop any decent fish with a rock fetish. I was next with a bigeye trev around 50cm, then dad got a bigger one at around 55cm.  Dad then scored a good Tarpon at 62cm, the biggest I've seen so far this year.  Had a few more hits but that was it.

At dawn we fished around the north wall for zip and spent some time in the broadwater looking for surface feeders but it was pretty quiet didn't see 1 bustup.  We moved offshore and went down to the scottish prince, picked up plenty of tailor and bonito around the 30-40cm mark.  Moved out to the bait reefs picked up some more bonito then moved north and found some big schools of small mack tuna (30-50cm)and pulled about 20 of them before calling it a day.  Alot of boats fishing the seaway on the way back but I didn't see any catches.

Water quality was very good with 5m+ vis at half tide up, bottom of the tide still looked a bit dirty though.  Water temps falling with a bit of variation, around 20-23 degrees. Still cant seem to find any numbers with the tarpon, they seem to be playing hard to get this year.