First up, congrats and great reports from the boys and girls who have been getting into the barra at both Awoonga and Mondy lately. You guys pushed me over the edge, and I had to do a run up to keep the IBD at bay.
There’s something very soothing about fishing after dark. Most of the noisy boats are gone, the stars are out, and there’s a half moon up. Your standing on the back deck, banging casts out towards the nervous bait flicking on the surface that you can hear but not see, and counting the shooting stars as they whiz down. Soothing that is, right up until an arm jolting strike stops your slow twitched hard body in its tracks, and something sounding like a harpooned whale breaches the surface a couple of meters from the boat, before ripping 30 off your bait caster quicker than you thought possible! Ahh barra fishing, so soothing!!
Paul’s report had me on the brink, word of Rod and Kimmy smacking em with Steve sent me over the edge, so I hooked up the tinny, threw the swag in, and blasted off at 3.30 yesterday morning for a dash and splash, and I mean dash, I had to be back home this arvo to pick up stuff for the missus!
On the water at 9ish, levels are down again from the last time I fished up here nearly 2 months ago, you cant short cut thru the gap between the basin island and the RHS main land, and there’s some nasty logs and shallow stuff poking out on the LHS, so take care if you running off old GPS plot lines in the dark!
With no time to poke around, all I could do was look at wind direction (North), where every one else was (South B – currently busier than Queen Street), and have a crack.
Decision made, it was do or die based on the choice, so I headed up past D Bay to a little indent Noel and I call 114 Bay that I thought mite be worth a shot, and it looked OK when half an hour in, a big girl slashed at the suspending hard bod and failed to connect, leaving the lure bobbing on the surface in the middle of a boil the size of wheel barrow. Moved on a bit, and tied off to a tree at the mouth of a creek bed that intersects the bay I was in, and pretty quickly blew a good meter fish when it stitched me up in the sticks quicker than I could get the tie off rope free and chase it. Bloody thing then rubbed salt in the wounds by free jumping 10 yards away while I was trying to de-snag the jig head from the tree it had rubbed me off on.
Lesson learnt, I changed tie off trees to give a better angle with regards to controlling a hooked fish, and managed an 80 something I released boat side on an X-Rap, and a frisky 97 that I thought was going to go the meter, so it went on the mat. Tried for a photo of me and the fish, but all I got was a shot of a tail and my foot, the perils of fishing solo lol!
Dusk session saw me hanging off a point, and that’s where the fish I first mentioned, the whale, comes in. I chased that thing a good hundred meters from point of hook up, it never surfaced once after the initial hook up, till I had it lying on its side next to the boat, big fish gleaming in the glow of the head lamp, it looked me in the eye, flared its gills, and coughed out that god damn B52 like it was a peanut, then it coasted off into the dark water,
I was crushed, that was the one, so close, and so far yet again. That same point later provided a short lived tussle to a smaller fish that handed me back 6 inches of chaffed 80lb leader and a jig head sans soft plastic.
A real quick session this morning at the same spot, and another bucket mouthed fish couldn’t resist, smashing the placcy in a couple of feet of water, going air borne, and spitting the jig head straight back into my lap – bugger!
So, 7 definite hits, one missed, one rubbed off, 3 dropped and 2 landed. My conversion rate sucks at the moment, but geez its fun trying!
cheers
brian
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