Now that work is out of the way for another day, tried to post this last night but I couldn't open ausfish.
We rented a place near the golf course between 30/12 and 06/01. Darren, my sisters partner, knows a bloke up that way who's been fishing all around the area for years, who was more than happy to show us around. Its just a pity the weather didn't come to the party, and the fish! Jacks were our main target, and every day we were up one of the many creeks around the area chucking lures and plastics at any structure we could see. Disappointingly, only 3 jacks were boated during the week, our local friend scored the only legal one at 37cm, and my brother got two on separate days, 28 and 33 cms. The legal fish was caught on a big curly tail grub-like plastic and my brothers were caught on berkley 5inch jerk shads. There were plenty of big hits on lures that didnt result in a hook up, and often we got cleaned up by something really big and fast. Once while retrieving a large paddle tail shad, I was cleaned up big time right under my nose while i watched. About 2-3 mts from the boat I was watching my line coming back through the water when all of a sudden this large jack screamed past on its side, hit my lure, the rod loaded up, then all i was left with was limp line. The other two in the boat were just as slack jawed as I was! Even though I was expecting this sort of behaviour, it was all over before I had time to react, and when I did, it was the limp line I whipped out of the water. At a guess I’d say minimum 40cms from the brief glimpse I had.
One of the great things about the places we fished was that you could position the boat so that on one side you could cast into structure and the deeper water next to mangroves, and on the other side of the boat you could fish the tidal flats. So even though we didn’t get a jack we still caught our share of undersize and legal flathead. I also managed to pull out 2 cod from Kauri creek in 2 casts, the first 32cms the second not far over 20, both caught on a hard body minnow diver. On another day, while the others were out on the water in snapper creek, I went for a wander down behind the dump which is also beside snapper but further upstream. As the sun was setting I fished around waiting for the head of the tide to push up. I got a few small hits on flick baits with resin heads, then changed to a yo zuri popper a bit later. After many casts, the light was fading quick so I had a couple more casts, one of which landed on dry sand on the other side, as I skipped it back, it got nailed halfway and not long after I had a not quite legal bream in my hand, the first fish I have caught on a popper. Happy? Yeah just a little!!!
We tried to make it over to Fraser but the weather just would not allow it for a boat of our size, ah well next time. So yeah things were quiet on the fishing front, it cant be said that we didn’t put in the effort, every day on the water and one of them was for nearly 16 hours! Our local friend even said that things were very quiet and he could only offer the weather as the reason. One of the highlights was the trip up Carlo creek in absolute silence after dark. We still don’t have our electric motor so we were tied up to our guides boat and he towed us up and back. He had 2 huge strikes at his popper, but that was all that happened despite all the other splashing we could hear going on all around us.
Anyway, the plan is to go back late January, hopefully we’ll do better then.
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