Seaway Weekly Wrap up Friday 6th September 2013

For a week that held such promise with some nice strong winds and good tides the results were decidedly below par. In fact it may well go down as my worst weeks fishing the seaway this year(at least I hope it does...). I went out Monday afternoon, swell was still quite small but the wind was up spent plenty of time looking for fish, prospecting the rock walls and trolling and my only result from that was one hookup on a trolled lure just on dark over the canyon, but it pulled the hooks. I went out again Wednesday morning, swell was much bigger and the wind was gusting to 30kts, again lots of time spent prospecting the edges, looking for fish and trolling and the only thing I managed was a couple of small mack tuna(30cm) on 7 gram sea rocks which were feeding at the top of the tide near the pipeline.

I spent a bit of time with the camera underwater on Wednesday to try and find the fish and found some interesting stuff though, a school of big kingfish sitting 6 metres down 50m east of the pipeline at the top of the tide, the usual bigeyes over the pipeline and a school of silver trevally off the end of the north wall. There is also spawning aggregations of luderick off the end of the north wall.
The water clarity is still around 8 metres which is still too clear, the snot weed is lessening though, another couple of weeks and it should be gone. The phosphorescence is still there at night but seems to be disapating slowly. The biggest problem at the moment seem to be the lack of bait coming through the seaway, and what bait there is, is tiny.. around 2cm long. There's plenty of bait well upstream though. So not much has changed in a week, but as always with the seaway you never know what could happen.  It's probably worthwhile seeing if you can get a live pike or two then drifting it over the area from the seaway tower to the pipeline for a kingie, fish heavy because they don't have far to go to bust you off.  Other than that... Observe. Experiment.

A porcupine fish on the bottom of the northern channel

Bottom structure in the northern channel

Assorted bottom structure in the northern channel

Up close to the pipeline

The pipeline with a small school of bigeyes

A school of Painted Sweetlip in the northern Y