It was decided to fish the classic in my mates 6.5m plate boat so it was a quick trip down to manly to sign in and a visit to seans place to grab a handful of his Petackle snapper buck tooth jigs, before heading home to pull all my best marks out of my gps. We left Bribie island around about 9am sat morning for a bumpy trip accross the top of the bay. Spent an hr or 2 jigging around the various markers for a mixed handful of slimies, pillies and yakkasbefore heading around the cape to try for some snapper.
After a few drifts over Brennan shoal for zip we decided to try another mark a bit further south on Roberts shoal. The first drift saw us land some hussar and a just legal squire (which went back). This looks promising we thought so we motored back over the mark and a few minutes into the drift Pauls line starts screaming away at a great rate of knots 5 minutes later he lands his best snapper of the year at 4.1kgWhile this was going I had had another good hit and miss on the drop and Ed had landed an 45cm AJ so after a few photos we set ourselves up for another drift. Just as we had drifted off the edge of the mark we had two rods buckled over with a couple of nice Ajs around about the 70-80cm mark which were both lost, one around the prop and the other a few metres below the boat when my 30lb leader rubbed through. As much fun as the AJs are they were not what we were targeting and due to the diminishing amount of daylight the call was made to head out to deep for the night time fish.
I had brought 6 of more better deep marks which we hit from sun down untill about 10pm with only memorable hookup on a buck tooth jig which just about spooled my tynos 8 and ended wearing through the 40lb leader after about 10min. One thing I will say about the Petackle jigs is that they look bloody freakywhen fully charged up and drifting away under the boat but they did account for most of the fish so they must work. We did find that putting a stinger hook on them accounted for more hook ups as the snaps tended to chew on the tail end of them rather then taking them in one hit.
We did ended up boating another 8 decent sized snaps and plenty of just legals which were all returned to the water. We had decided to anchor up on one of my better marks to fish the rest of the night but due to the fact we were all to tired to bother changing our rigs to fish in the roaring current we decided to just hit the sack and have a fish in the morning.
At first light seeing as how the wind had dropped off during the night we packed up the swags and dropped our lines down the 80 or 90 odd metres to the bottom with a brick of lead on each to try for a few more. With that amount of lead on it made kind of difficult ot feel the bites so after landing another 2 around the 40-45cm mark the call was made to up anchor and dirft some of the more northern marks.
We drifted these marks for another two fish before heading back to roberts shoal to try for another larger specimen. We had two drifts over the marks and couldnt even loose a bait due to the amount of boats around. By this time the wind had dropped right off and the call was made to head back to bribie to clean the boat and get to manly for the weigh in. Well by the time we finished cleaning the boat it was 20 past 3 so a quick call was made to the boat club to see what size snaps had been weighed in and it was decided that we would just head home.
All in all it was a great trip with some good mates and some quality fish caught, the weather wasnt the best during the night but it was still an enjoyable outing (i think being in a 6.5m boat with a cabin compared to my 5.1m cc makes a big difference) Sorry about the long winded report guys but I've got a bit of spare time today so decided to go into a bit more detail then usual
Cheers marto
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