Weather was looking perfect for wednesday/thursday so headed up to my parents place on tues night to head out over night on wednesday for a trip up to northern end of Fraser Island, even though the 1kw transducer for the furuno sounder had decided to start a new life on the bottom of the ocean last trip, but thats another story....
Left Urangan boat harbour at 12.30pm and headed north in almost efect conditions. Got to our secret spot in the never nevers wide off wathumba about 45mins later and did a few drifts before achoring. The patch of reef or rubble is only about 40-50metres square but the three times we have fished it, it has produced lots of fish and tis trip was no different. Boated 22 frying pan snapper/bowen snapper, heaps of what we call pinkies(not sure what they are, but they are good eating and good bait) 1 decent blackall/mowong, and one very lost red emporer.
Then headed up to rooneys to anchor up for the night. This proved very hard as there was a north westerly blowing just enough to make it hrd to achor right on the spot. Got close enough and started catching some nice scarlet sea perch, few moses perch and hussar but then wind kept blowin us off the mark. The old man hooked up to a monster on the handline and got it to the boat in about 5mins, after thinking it was a shark at first sight it turned out to be a cobia of 5-6ft long, i missed it with the gaff twice due to the poor lighting and it was gone, needless to say the old man wasn't too happy and had some nice line cuts with nothing to show for them. Bout 10 mins later I hook up to something huge, thinking it was a) another big cobia or b) a shark, after 5-10mins of fighting it, and at one stagenot being able to gain any line for a couple of mins due to the sheer weight of the fish, finally got it to the surface to fnd out it was a massive stingray about 6-7ft accross
Laid down for a rest at about midnight and set the alarm to wake at 3.30am before the next slack tide. woke up shifted and reanchored but again the wind played havoc now blowing 10-15knots from the south west. Got a few more scarlets and some nice coreal bream/grass sweetlip before heading back home in a nice 0.5-1m chop that the now 20knot southerly had whipped up. Was back at the ramp at 9am thurs morning.
All in all a good trip considering we had no sounder what so ever, and were just fishing our GPS marks. Couple of pics below for viewing