Headed out into Cleveland Bay today in hopes of a feed of crab and a few barra fillets.
We took off from the CG ramp at about 8am this morning, so gentleman's hours, and headed straight acroos the bay to drop some pots and go and try and catch a barra.
Matty and I put in 7 pots, total, baited with grunter, trevally and mullet, and went off in search of some live bait.
Bait was absolutely every where, but proved very hard to get because it was so spread out due to the little tidal movement, and the massive amount of fresh coming out of the creeks.
We managed to get a handful of live mullet, in between flicking a few lures, so before we headed of to drown them, we check the pots after only an hour's soak.
We pulled in masses of big monster muddies in the first pot, but all were jennies, so they were tipped out and we reset the pot. We continued this pattern with heaps of big jennies in all our pots, but we managed to get about 9 bucks from our first run, so not too shabby.
Next we headed up to a spot of matt's where we would wait for the tide to change and hopefully get a barra coming back down out of the shallow mangroves. But all we got was sunburnt and a few midgee bites after an hour or so, so we elected to move, try and find some deeper water, and check the pots once again.
This run we only get another 5 to add to our kreels, so we reset and move on to find some barra.
We made our way up Coco, and were surprised at how deep it was in there (first time in that creek) so we prompty found the drop off which looked very good, with a few shows of big fishing holding the bottom. We despatched our livies to not get touch for another couple of hours. In the meantime, I tied up the crabs we already had, that were sitting on ice to put the to sleep.
Getting tired of doing nothing but being crispy fried, we again set off to check our line of pots once again, this time adding another 3 to the ice to 'sleep'. After resetting, the arvo seabreeze starting to kick in, nothing too serious, but we were getting starting to get sore from our sunburn, so we just threw the anchor over in some random location and threw out some baits for another 20-30min, before doing our final pot check, before packing them up and heading home.
Now for the exciting part (well the most exciting through out the day anyway) Pulling up the first pot saw us with more jennies and a few jjjjuuuust undersize very rusty bucks (breaks your heart when you throw them back, knowing they'll be absolutely chockers) we come to the second pot in the line and there's a big buck clinging to the outside of the pot. Without any thought for personal safety I pounced on it and promply threw it in the boat to lift the pot aboard. this happened to be the only legal buck for that pot, and we didn't even have to trap it!
The rest of the pots yeilded one more good sized buck, and yet more just under rusty buck and jennies.
Satisfied with what was filling the esky we set off home with a total of 18 muddies, some pretty bright red faces, and a smile on our dial.
Pic of the crabs count:
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