Seaway and Broadwater Report Sunday 17th June 2012

I was undecided on which day to go fishing this weekend, I knew the tides favoured an evening fish with a chance for GT's, Tarpon and bigeyes but the weather was going to be an issue.  On saturday I didnt like the northerly winds even though the tides were better for GT's than sunday(obviously this didn't prove to be the case in the end) so I decided on Sunday which had better tides for after dark fishing.  On the water on Sunday at 2pm, we had plenty of time before the GT's got active so we spent some time around the north wall.  I had a new rig to test for daytime fishing and it worked, landing a GT around 50cm.  One fish is not exactly a successful test but it has potential, slugs got nothing though I did see a couple of tailor caught by another boat around 3.30pm.  At 3pm the wind dropped off and we did the rounds looking in all the spots where GT's might be feeding but saw nothing.

Went back to the north wall and fished until about 3.45pm then did another circuit.  This time we saw a couple of bustups in close to south straddie so we hung around and sure enough the GT's came up.  A bit skittish at first, they soon switched it on big time and we had double hookups for the next hour or so until the sun set.  even when they weren't busting on the surface we could drop a twistie down and hookup straight away.  The bait they were chasing was quite large they looked like big pilchards to me, around 10cm long.  I tried casting a minnow into them as well and that worked as well as the twisties we were using.   Lost count of the number landed but it would have been over 15 with most fish in the 60-65cm bracket.  Nothing huge but top fun regardless.

After sunset we tried for Tarpon but got nothing then went for a fish in the broadwater, trolled around for a bit picked up one bigeye, then tried casting some grassminnows around picked up another half dozen bigeyes biggest going around 50cm plus another GT around 55cm.  Interestingly they only want the plastics deadsticked and wouldn't hit them moving.  Had another go for Tarpon but got zip and headed back to the ramp.

Pretty good afternoon night overall, the weather behaved itself and the fish were cooperative for the most part, I think I'm getting the hang of these afternoon fishes now.  Good to see the GT's still around in numbers and hungry if you can find them at the right time.  Water temps 20.2-21.5 degrees.  Water visibilty about 50cm at the bottom of the tide, improving to 2 metres at mid tide, takes about 2 hours for the clean water to start pushing in.