Headed North today to fish the Pumicestone today. The plan was to get out and chase Mackerel early then venture back up the Pumicestone to target anything that swims.
Well the mackerel did not want to play and there was not much around except for a couple of squid and a few other small species. So we opted now to go back up the Pumicestone.
Basically we moved up and down the passge for not much in the size department and the water was basically dead of boat traffic.
We moved further north to another area and it to was empty of life with only a few fish around.
I was working a small shallow running hardbody that is designed for bream in 3 foot of water and it got snagged on some unseen weed. I ripped the lure out of the reel and then it happened. My poor little Daiwa infeet 2004 reel had its drag fried on the first run. These reels are only a finesse reel and have a 1 washer element and cannot fish more then 2kg max on a heavy drag setting. Since I was running a 3lb leader my setting was considerably less then this. The first run of this fish saw at least 40-50m taken from my reel before I managed to turn the boat to follow.
With the leccy on full power heading into to wind and swell I had to stop the fish from getting to a reefy rocky area that was around 150m away and he was heading straight for it. At one stage of the fight I had a small glimpse of backing under the few remaining wraps of braid and that told me that I had about 80m of 3lb braid off the reel. After about a 5 min fight chasing the fish and getting the line back on the reel I saw a silver flash. Thoughts of foul hooked stingray had diminished but the thought of a good jew were becoming believable.
Well as we got closer and with a heap of fight still left I played the fish around the boat a few times and tried to head him off at the pass as we were about 10-20m from that rocky reef. Finally we scooped the net under a nice little GT.
It was a great capture considering that it was on caught on 3lb braid, 3lb leader and using a reel based for finesse fishing and the rod I was using was Dawia Heartland Z solid core, which is basically has a very small range of pulling power before it is totally loaded up.
So there you go, a nice smallish GT in skinny water on light line.
Cheers
Lee
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Originally Posted by stessco
