Hi All,
I've been desperate for a fish, and Saturday morning was really my only option. I like to fish the tide change out at Harry's, and the Saturday morning low was something like 4.45am. A bit of mental arithmetic, and I realised I'd have to get out of bed at about 3am to have a shot at being set up for the tide change. A check of Seabreeze showed that it was supposed to be <5kt all night, so I decided to forgo sleep and launched the boat from Manly at just after midnight. Plan was to anchor up, burley, and float out some baits for a few hours, then drop SPs all over the place on a drift on the tide change.
Being my first night trip, and first time fishing solo at night, I took my time to get myself sorted and decided to do a few drifts to work out where to anchor. Figured I might as well send down a SP for sheets and giggles while I was drifting anyway, and the Gulp Squid Vicious seemed ideal.
I was really just screwing around, not expecting a thing, when I got a couple of taps on the line. Thought another drift or two might be in order as there was something down there awake at that ungodly hour. A couple of drifts turned into a couple more drifts and just as it was hitting 2am, something hit my pretty little nuc chook squid vicious. Something heavy. Or heavy enough. Pulled a good bit of line, slowly and steadily, with a few head shakes. If it wasn't for the headshakes, I would have called it for a ray. It would take slow runs. It was an interesting situation, fishing by the moonlight (not counting the light from the sounder and the nav lights), could see which way the rod tip was pointing, but couldn't see the line. I had no idea how much line was out, when I finally saw some silver colour below the surface. First thought: "Awww, a little Jewie, must've foul hooked him". I was somewhat wrong. Turns out he wasn't s close to the surface as I had thought. When he finally popped up and made it into the boat, he measured out at 87cm. I was not only pretty happy with it (only caught two legal jewies prior to this night, with the biggest going somewhere around 92cm), but quite surprised to score on a SP so far from the tide change.
Anyway, thought that was pretty cool so thought I'd make the drift just one more time (yeah, right!).
Very next drift, I got hammered. This one had more weight and took off with a whole lot more speed. I fell into a dream of a huge snapper, maybe even the mythical 20 pounder. I was confident of my knots and gear, and just took my time. Much more time than with the aforementioned jew. Finally, I saw colour in the moonlight. Another jew! While I was disappointed it wasn't a PB snapper, it was a new PB at 97cm.
Not long after that, the wind started to blow a bit, and the water started to chop right up (or so it seemed in the dark). I continued to slog it out for the next 60-90min, but it was dark, I was cold and my boat is only a 4.2m. My concern was that once the tide changed, the wind would be against the current, and it'd get a whole lot messier. With 2 jew on board, I called it a night and started the very slow trip back. Could barely get over 6 knots. Started to calm by the time I got to Green Is, and by the time I hit the leads into Manly, the sky became significantly lighter and the bay was glassed out again!
Long story for two fish, but hey, what else am I supposed to do while the girlfriend is watching TV?
Oh, went pretty much 5kg and 7kg. I expected a bit more weight out of them, the 92cm I caught a few months ago went 7.5kg.
Cheers!
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Originally Posted by Damned67
