Seaway and Inshore report Saturday 26th May 2012

Went for a fish on saturday morning, the rain friday night and dodgy forecast ensured we had the seaway to ourself for a few hours. On the water at 3am, conditions were good with zero swell and a mild westerly. Conditions were perfect for Tarpon so we targeted those, we found them after about 20 mins. We found them to be a bit fussy as they only wanted the lures coming from a certain direction, they also only wanted silver or white grass minnows they wouldn' touch the chartreuse. Such is the fussy behaviour of seaway tarpon. Anyway we landed 5 out of 15 or so hookups, all good quality fish between 58 and 62cm. Good fun.
Just on dawn we pullled a couple of small jewies then we headed south to the scottish prince and caught some small tailor and bonito. Back to the seaway for the start of the run in tide, I decided to try my split shot rig over the graveyard. First cast and a couple of twitches and it gets smashed and the line screams off the reel at top speed and the fish heads south around the front of the wall back into the seaway at top speed, I knew how this was going to end and about 10 seconds later so it did with the line touching the rocks and a bustoff. One of these days I'm going to land one of these big fish I hook in front of the wall.... Once I had rigged up again on the next cast in the same spot I pulled a 47cm Cale Cale Trevally which is a new species for me. With the tide now running in we had a look in the broadwater for surface feeders but the only thing we found were some lesser queenfish, good size though with the best fish going 48cm. That was it for the day, pretty good session overall, the split shot rig has loads of potential and I'll be using it alot more over the next few months.

 

Why Seawayfishing was offline and what it means for the future of this site.

As regular readers are no doubt aware Seawayfishing exceeded its allocated bandwidth on the evening of 20th may and subsequently the site's hosting company blocked all external access including mine.  Seawayfishing was created by me 2 years ago as a place to keep all my reports and data as well as let other anglers post theirs. It runs on a shoestring budget, the cheapest plan available(which is why sometimes during peak periods at night sometimes it wont load).  For a while now Seawayfishing has been growing exponentially with more readers and registered user's most of these are non active who read but don't contribute.  More users means more bandwidth usage and it has gotten to the point where it can no longer be supported on the current hosting plan it is on. That means it needs more money to continue.

Web sites are supported by one of 3 ways.

1. Advertising: The google ads you see running on the back pages contribute virtually nothing to the expenses of this site and I am not inclined to go out and get 'proper' advertisers who will pay decent rates. Especially as most tackle shops at the moment will be doing it tough like the rest of the country.
2. Donating:   Dontating money to a site usually doesn't work although it can raise a small amount initially, people usually don't willingly contribute money to a site they have been using for free.
3. Paid membership:  So far this looks like the only realistic option to get enough money to go forward. Although its likely most of you will just get pissed off about and it and leave never to return. At the moment I'm thinking of a small am0unt say $9.95 per year, active members(people posting reports) would get free membership for the first year.

So those are the choices I have, I'm not going to do anything straight away and I haven't decided what to do but I'll be keeping a close eye on the bandwidth usage this month and may institute changes if it gets close to the mark.  Being offline for so long willl have cut the users down a bit so we should have a bit of breathing room in that regard.   Feel free to discuss it below, but lets keep the righteous indignation to a minimum shall we.