Saturday morning 2nd Feb

My brother and I were keen to get out this weekend obviously because last weekend was a no go and another week with no fishing just wasn’t on. Checking the weather forecasts and knowing the swells and water quality was going to be crap, a new plan of attack was in order. Our goal was to fish a bit later than usual and gather livies for a bait session on the incoming tide. That got thrown out the window as soon as we reached the walls for a look around.

When we arrived at about 5.40 we were watching the huge swells in front of north wall and soon said it was time to get livies. My bro though, somehow spotted some birds working behind south wall and with a bit of debating between us, we decided we’ll try to get closer.

With the swell the way it was, we played it safe and took our time to get there. As soon as we were within range of a cast and in a safe distance of the breaking waves, we fired off some slugs into the group of diving birds. A double hook up straight away, a nice dart and a bigeye trev around the mid 40s was soon landed. That was the start of a great session for us and in the next three hours, we landed and lost more fish than we’ve caught in our last 4 outings. It wasn’t prolific at all times but we were kept quite busy chasing the fish around and keeping the boat in a safe position.

Overall we landed more than a dozen big eye trevs, same amount of dart, a dozen or so tailor, 2 amber jacks and 1 small yellowtail kingie. Size wasn’t on our side as we didn’t land any fish over 60cm. Largest big eye trev was 56cm, largest dart was about 40cm, tailor were all between 30 – 45cm, 52cm and 29cm amber jack and a 55cm kingie.

When the fish weren’t breaking the surface we worked the dirty water lines and had plenty of success. The stand out lures were the 20gram and 30 gram twisties, did try spinner baits in the wash and dirty water with no result. Thinking back we should have given poppers and plastics a go, might have even paid off if we put some effort to get live bait as well.

The water was very choc brown and visibility was really poor, swell was inconsistent with huge ones coming in every now and again. Wind was under 10knots however it did pick up when we were heading home. The clean water was pushing through strong and at about 9am it reached close to the pipeline. Cruised down to wave break for a look but water was still too choco colour so gave it away about 9.15am.

This morning provided plenty of double hook-ups, 1 new species off the seaway list (amber jack) and we got to sleep in. Overall , pretty good morning, doesn’t happen often enough though.