We launched the boat around 4:30pm and went to put in the pots to soak and pick up some bait. Managed to get plenty of good sized herring as well as a few mullet so everything was ready for either a Jack or Shark. After having a quick troll around to see if we could pick up a any flathead (0) we set up near the casino at around 6:30pm to fish the top of the tide. The burley tube was packed with goodness and the live herring were cast over to the snags while the live mullet was set out in the deeper water.

Unfortunately the local shark didn't understand how this is supposed to work so the juicy mullet with 8/0 hook and 60lb wire trace was ignored in preference for the skinny herring with 30lb fluorocarbon leader and 4/0 hook. As you can imagine the fight was short and didn't end as we had hoped.

After not much else happening we decided to move further up the canals towards the lake entrances to fish the run out tide. Same setup although a couple of the herring decided to drop off the mortal coil so we also put out some dead baits. After 30 minutes of not much we started to get a couple of decent bream taps on the dead bait so they came in and on went the 10lb leader with 1/0 hook. 15 minutes later we had 3 bream just over 30cm and my first ever legal moses perch on the Gold Coast. Was nearly 35cm so a big improvement over the 20cm models that usually annoy me.

Then the target species decided to arrive (we think) and a big hit was made on... the flesh bait with 1/0 hook and 10lb leader. My mate made an admirable attempt but the bait was small and the fish was big and the 10lb leader just couldn't hold up to a jack with every intention of going back into the mangroves he came out of.

After that we picked up a few more bream around 27cm which went back to grow bigger before pulling stumps around 10pm. Managed to pull 2 good sized bucks out of six pots with around 5 undersize bucks and of course the mandatory 2kg jenny that I'm sure is placed there just to get you excited.

So all in all was a mixed night, caught enough to make the trip worthwhile but a bit disappointing we couldn't land the target species.