Into the seaway at 3am, task for the morning was to spend some time looking for Tarpon in an effort to try and find the main school, not the ones and two's we have been seeing lately. Wind was 5-10kts from the East, occasional showers with just a half meter of easterly swell. The tide had turned to run out about 2 hours ago so the water had just begun to dirty. We looked in all the usual spots and jumped off one fish, had a sound around for GT's(nope) before looking at some new area's. Took us a little while to find them and a slight change of technique before we started to get Tarpon in numbers. Lure used was the ever faithful CCM grass minnow on a 3/8th oz head and the technique was a slow roll with extended pauses. So basically cast in, wind in about 5 metres quick to pick up slack then a pause for about 15 seconds, then about 2 metres of slow roll, then 15 seconds of pause etc. The Tarpon would either grab it straight away or tap at it all the way to the boat. I did manage to hook one with only about 3 metres of line out. With the high tidal flow in this area, the extended pauses just let the plastic get down a bit deeper while still maintaning a swimming action on the plastic. We ended up with 10 hookups and 5 Tarpon landed best going 69cm for the morning.
With first light upon us we changed tack and went to the end of the north wall, on went the 80mm Dropbear slick rigs and we began slow rolling them across the front of the wall which has proved a good technique lately. Dad was on to a fish on his first cast which turned out to be a 70cm Jewie. We kept doing that for another half an hour for no more interest. We changed to poppers around the front of the wall and I had a few hits on a flash stick 9 before dad landed a tailor on the 40cm range on a Chrome skitter pop. That was it unfortnately, no more hits on poppers. The sun rose and nothing else was interested, we saw a few schools of 30cm mack tuna just outside the walls on either side, plus some queenies down near wavebreak. Had a quick look for GT's over the canyon but nothing. Plenty of boats around the pipe chasing jewies and the hairtail have arrived, you can tell by the pack of boats sitting on the Northern Corner(Map 1). Might see if I can troll one up later on in the week. Called it a morning around 9am.
Date | Time Fished | Tides | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Monday 15th July | 3.00am - 9.00am | 0014 1.34 0640 0.25 1312 1.19 1855 0.47 | ||
Successful Lure’s Rundown
Fishing Gear Used
SWF Strong LLBC702M/ML 7? Spin rod / Daiwa Ballistic 3000 Reel /12lb Yellow Spider Braid / 30lb Famell Super Shock Leader
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Nice Tarp mate. Nearly as big as the Jew. Very informative with the techniques used. Cheers for the report.