With the esky still loaded up with some fresh strip baits from saturday, we headed back out wide of townsville at gentleman's hour on sunday morning.
Got to the boat ramp at around 9.30 and had a half hour jog back to the pontoon after finding a car park miles away from the ramp. Once we stuck our nose out of ross ck we were greeted with flat sea's all the way to the reef.
Pulled up at the reef and noticed the pro's were there, with about 6 dories working the reef, and i'm presuming they must have been there for a while. In 3hrs of working some very good ground (which reliably produces the fish) we only managed were a few red throat and a couple of undersized trout. With that we moved out into the deeper waters to look for some fish, hoping for reds.
Found some likely territory and the first drop we managed triple hook up on reds. over the next couple of hours we filled the esky with large mouth nannagi to 7kg, reds to 12kg, some spangles and rosy job fish.
As Dark approached, the bite stopped but we persisited trying to get the last 4 reds for our limit. Sharks moved in and stretched our arms so our hopes were fading of getting any more reds. A quick double hook up produced another 2 reds and the next drop had my new Saragosa screaming as i hooked upto something with big headshakes. I called it for another big red, and was expecting it to be the best for the trip, yet once i got it to the mid water a big shark grabbed it and i couldn't stop the shark. I locked the drag up and held on for dear life yet i couldn't turn this shark around. I was expecting to get spooled as my arms were aching and i had to back the drag off because i was scared the rod was going to get pulled from my grasps. I was praying for a knot to break or the hook to straighten and eventually the shark bit through the fish and i brought up the head of a GT still weighing around 7.5kg.
We called it a night and headed back for the ramp, arriving at midnight with 2 full esky's and having travelled around 300km