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I'm after some advice on trying to get onto some red emperor around the lucinda area, we have been trying for years now to get onto reds and nanagyi, finally sussing out the nanny's after some good advice from this forum we have found some nice fishing grounds and can get some decent fish by just following the contour lines on the map. But this being said we are still yet to catch a legal red, we've spend days looking for good ground in anything from 30m right through to 80m but can't seem to find anything but nanny's with alot of good shows on the bottom producing nothing at all. We've tried fishing these marks day and night without success, so would greatly appreciate any help we can get, particularly any marks we can get our hands on. i'm fishing out of a 6m plate alluminium with 250L+ of fuel so distance isn't a huge factor. Another question is what do reds look like on the sounder? any different to nanny's?
I haven't fished the lucinda area myself so i can't tell you much about fishing that area, but of this year we have been finding a few quality reds off townsville, and we are slowly putting together a few tricks that seem to working well for us.
First thing we've found is the further out your willing to head, the more likely you are to getting onto good schools of reds (less fishing pressure on the outer reefs and more 'unfished' ground). You say you have a 250ltr tank, so that should give you pretty good range, so look at your charts and work the contour lines out wide.
Big Baits mean big fish - have a read of some of Reefmaster's reports and you'll soon see what i mean by big baits. Fishing off fraser and DI these guys are using whole tailer and mullet as one bait. We use big strip baits pinned on ganged hooks or even livies if we can get them. The bigger baits allow the smaller fish to come and nibble, until the larger fish move in to see what the fuss is about and eventually will take the big bait (in theory it sounds good, and usually always works for us if the big fish are around). I have put down whole butterflied husser in the past.
In these schools of Reds that we have been finding, usually the large mouth nannagi are mixed in with them as well as big spangles and some cod etc. So chances are if you are finding the shoals that are holding large mouth nannagi, there could be some big reds around. We have been catching them both day and night, however some days they just don't feed. On the sounder, some times you don't even see the fish arches because they are hugging the bottom that tight. So what you are looking for is some type of shoaly bottom. Regardless if there are no fish showing, they may still be fish holding there very close to the bottom. Nannagi sometimes can be seen sitting up off the bottom, and at times, Reds are also like this, it depends in how active they are. Scott hilliar was saying at the boat show the other week, that if he pulls up to one of his shoaly marks and see's the fish up off the bottom, he'll usually tell his deckie to get the video camera out, as that uaually means they are feeding. In June's fishing monthly they had a good article about fishing off mackay in the shipping channels on the small shoals. If you can find a copy, it's a good read.
A good sounder is the trick, as well as alot of patience and persistance. It has taken us a few years to be able to land quality reds, and even still we come home some trips very disappointed.
yeah we had noticed that when we have been out fishing for the nanny's that there have been a couple distinct lines of fish on the sounder but have always figured they were the spangles and other fish sitting apart from the nanny's. We've tried sticking down big baits at our usual mark with great success however even with a deck winch we were still not able to get the fish up before the sharks hit them so we're not sure what the fish actually are... Thanks for all your help.
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