Headed out from Mooloolaba early yesterday morning on super platey "Alexander" with usual crew of 4 on board.
The seas were glassed out so the big boy was given its head and the twin 250 suzukis were humming along at 40 knots. I fell asleep on my bean bag in the back corner of the boat.
Arrived at first snapper mark just after sun up and I boated first two snapps within minutes and then nothing. Headed up to a reef we call tiger shark reef and dropped anchor on a good show but bloody current was running about 2 knots. We changed over from snood rigs to paternosters with 12oz droppers.
The parrot were coming in at a steady rate mixed with a few snapper, gold spot wrasse and moses perch as well as a plague of just under sized pearlies.
Within an hour the reef security guard (aka 4metre tiger shark) made an appearance when it followed up a decent sized parrot. The current started to drop off so I switched back to my light outfit with a 8 ball sinker. I was hit half way down by a decent snapper which peeled off some line with drag set at 4kg. About half way up the tiger shark grabbed my snapper and took off, I reset the lever drag to about 8kg but three of us couldn't get the big buggar to the surface. The 30lb line snapped with only about 20 metres left on the spool out of the original 350metres. Buggar!!!!
The fish went off the bite so we moved 7ks to out favourite snapper mark and anchored on a good show. The current now was non existant so we used snood rigs and small sinkers as per the pic attached. It was slow at first and I foolishly requested a move but the skipper, Pepi was right in staying as the bite improved and over the next two hours snapper and a good 4kg pearlie were boated.
At about 2pm we were getting worried about the storm clouds on the horizon and decided to head in early with a good mixed bag of 47 fish. As we moved closer to Mooloolaba we could see lightning and the seas were getting very choppy. Nearing the boat ramp it started to rain, lucky, lucky as we had thoughts of going up with the boat if a lightning bolt struck us. After a change of undies we got stuck into two large pizzas then headed back to Brissy.
Cheers
Barry
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Have a gr8 Xmas and New Year.
