So the start of summer, and still plenty of activity on the surface to suggest some big specimens around. I put in some live bait for most of the day without success. Towards the end of the day, I hooked up to a beast of a fight, but much unlike the typical fight of a kingfish, so my guess was either a salmon or a bonito. After a short fight, I pull up this beast of an Australian Salmon towards the 70cm and 3kg mark!
The weather was starting to warm up for the upcoming summer and the warmer waters were definitely attracting the bigger species. The thrashing of water was a sign of the pelagics chasing the baitfish, most likely Salmon and Bonito. We put in a live yellowtail and after a short 10-20 minute wait, the line started peeling off the reel! I fortunately had a 4000 Daiwa with 20lb braid which was more than enough line to keep it occupied, although I was more worried about the nearby anchors that always seems to prove my undoing. After a vicious 20 minute fight, we brought up this beauty at a touch under 80cm
Couldn’t quite get our hands on any live bait, so we threw in some cut up bait in hope for some bumper bream. We instead hooked on to a rat king! (slang for the smaller specimens) at the 45-50cm mark. You might be able to make out the circle hook that is still on the corner of its mouth. The brilliant thing about the way circle hooks are designed is that it does least possible damage to the fish yet it doesn’t seem to lessen the strike rate. You need to be a bit more patient with the circle hooks though, as they are designed for the fish to swallow completely and they’ll hook themselves on.
So firstly, sincerest apologies, it has been about three years since I last posted. I guess that’s what happens when you start a family! There hasn’t been any shortage of fishing though, so I will look to blog about all the fishing during that time.
So in this post, we caught a thumper trevally at about the 40cm mark and took home plenty of bait as we were running well short. The trevally have a tell-tale fight of swimming in a circle and you bring them up, and tend to punch quite a lot above their weight! The baitfish were a mix of pilchards and yellowtail.
So the Autumn weather had arrived together with the end of daylight savings, which made for some chilly sunsets and early days. But the cold weather also bring in some big squid as well. Knowing this, we concentrated our efforts on some squid jigging. I would normally go the smallest size I can get to target the bait sized squid as well, but I switched to a slightly larger model, a 2.5 in hope of some southern calamari. So after a good hour of fruitless jigging, I felt a familiar pull on my line. It at first feels like you’ve hoooked on to some seaweed as it feels like a dead weight, up until they hit the hooks and try to pull away. I called it a southern as the pull is more intense. After a few hours of jigging we managed a two large specimens at around the 30cm mark.
We also ended up with a keeper bream by dropping some small bait underneath us. A short fight ensued to prevent a dive behind the pylons.