Burley_Boy
26-02-2005, 02:24 PM
Had the boat in the water just after four but it took us a while to get to Palm beach. We went directly to a previously productive mark and sounded around, found a bit of a bait school so dropped the pick and hoped to jig some livies while the other rods went out with frozen pillies.
Alas either due to the slack of the tide or my poor angling skills I only got one yakka, the only other hit on the bait rig wanted to tak me to NZ so I rigged up the poor lonely yakka with a set of gang hooks as per Geoff Wilsons method of putting the first reversed hook in the top of the fish and letting the other hooks trail down the side. This poor fish put up with a lot but was never hit all morning.
The pilchards started to attract interst and soon we boated 3 Spotties. After 7 sometime it went quiet so eventually we pulled the pin and decided to explore the territory a bit better. We ended up a fair way off from where the other boats were moored but after some sizeable bait appeared on the sounder we dropped anchor again and sent out the pillies.
After sitting at this spot for a while I started to see large schools of spotties, not working the surface but travelling right accross our path. Seemed like we had hit spotty hwy. This time my rods with the single strand 69lb trace showed clear signs of spooking the fish as we could see them circling the bait and invariably they would take the gang hook without trace.
Eventually I had to resort to putting hooks in without trace and ended up with at least a dozen bite offs. By the end of the session we had lost a fair bit of mono leader and stacks of hooks and lost quite a few close to the boat or around the anchor, stuffed up after double hookups and I becmae chief gaff engineer, but we had at least boated 7 spots with the largest going to 8kg and 93cm.
All in all 27kg of fantastic fighting fish.
Mackarel for tea once more ;D ;D ;D
Alas either due to the slack of the tide or my poor angling skills I only got one yakka, the only other hit on the bait rig wanted to tak me to NZ so I rigged up the poor lonely yakka with a set of gang hooks as per Geoff Wilsons method of putting the first reversed hook in the top of the fish and letting the other hooks trail down the side. This poor fish put up with a lot but was never hit all morning.
The pilchards started to attract interst and soon we boated 3 Spotties. After 7 sometime it went quiet so eventually we pulled the pin and decided to explore the territory a bit better. We ended up a fair way off from where the other boats were moored but after some sizeable bait appeared on the sounder we dropped anchor again and sent out the pillies.
After sitting at this spot for a while I started to see large schools of spotties, not working the surface but travelling right accross our path. Seemed like we had hit spotty hwy. This time my rods with the single strand 69lb trace showed clear signs of spooking the fish as we could see them circling the bait and invariably they would take the gang hook without trace.
Eventually I had to resort to putting hooks in without trace and ended up with at least a dozen bite offs. By the end of the session we had lost a fair bit of mono leader and stacks of hooks and lost quite a few close to the boat or around the anchor, stuffed up after double hookups and I becmae chief gaff engineer, but we had at least boated 7 spots with the largest going to 8kg and 93cm.
All in all 27kg of fantastic fighting fish.
Mackarel for tea once more ;D ;D ;D