G'day
Well, after workin at the restruant last night with my uncle and 4 hours sleep i was up at 1:50am to get ready. Boat all packed and absolutly delighted with the position of my new little bait freezer in the shed, only 5 of 6 steps from where I sit the boat. Left home at 2:25 and picked my business associate pete up for a fish, at 2:30. We headed off to wello point ramp from wakerly and got there about 3am. Just a nice moderate breeze blowing ata bout 10 knotts and upon arrival we spotted about 6 or 7 boats anchored along the drop off from huybers light all the way to south of the leads at wello. It's going to be a busy morning i thought. With an hour before first light and 2.5 hours before a .29m low this was going to be good. Headed out through the leads and dropped the pots in an easterly fashion. Once that task was completed we went north along to green. Not too much swell, nothing the little 12' couldn't handle anyway. We crossed paths with the trawler on the was up to green... and on the reef shelf at green came within 80M of a tinny...... no bloody lights. Lucky i saw a very very dull silver silhouette against the black horizon. Anyway with the water temp reading 28 deg. celcius and a clear starry morning sky we headed to spot x on the nor eastern tip of green. I wasn't satisfied with the show on spot x all that much so i decided to slowly motor in a bit shallower. Checked over another spot and then another with finally settling on a new bit of ground. This turned out to be a great move. During the morning there were 6 to 8 boats there before sunrise and by 6:30 and 7am we counted about 25. This reminded me of a second hand floating boat yard. At this new spot we were in 3.2M of water. Over went the secret burley mixture in the bucket and then the sounder started to look very very good for the next few hours. First rod out was my trusty floater setup with a WA pilly. This landed me a nice and my first mowong/slate bream. This went 48cm. Next on the cards were a few mixed species, a few moses perch in there, pete caught his first sandcrab and on a line at that. It's pretty funny watching a lively 46y/o jump round the boat. Needless to say once in the esky it was all good. During first light pete saw an orange cord floating on the surface with the current. Needless to say we pulled it in to see what it was and to throw it in the bin later. It was attacked to a dilly and the float had obviously been struck by an outboard at one stage. In this dilly there were 2 male sandies, both of legal size but one was dead and had been for a couple of days. The other one was alive still so we kept it. This dilly had no name on it and was obviously lost at sea so we disabled it to prevent any more unnessecary killing. Back to the fishing, a nice little squire was boated after that which went 38cm and a welcome addition to our boat. Other fish kept were 4 more moses perch and another slate bream, slightly smaller than the first. After hanging around for a bit with continued show but off the bite we boaed a small legal bream but decided to throw it back. The sun by this time was getting to high for my liking so i headed away from the other boats in a se direction and anchored up in 6M of water. Here action was slow and far between compared to the 1st position but managed an undersize squire (returned) and kept a parrot fish and another sand crab. After this episode we went shallower again to a known pinicle and set up there. Here we boated a number of undersize grassies and the off happy moment. Looks like the big boys didnt want to come out and play. With a great mornings fishin under our belts and about 930am we headed for the wello point leads to collect the crab pots. Out of 5 pots in for about 6 or so hours we managed an angry mongrel of an eel about 2' long, a patetic excuse for a sand crab and a happy moment. Back at the ramp with 3 sand crabs on board, 2 decent slate/mowong, 5 moses perch, a nice squire and a parrrot i'm going to call this trip a pretty good success. the GPS said we travelled 17.75km and fuel consumption without having too much of a look was about 6L. I cannot complain about that. Back to petes place to wash the boat down, get a feed and had a swim. And it was great to teach his 2 little girls (7 and 9 yrs) how to gill and gut the fish. Just flushed the little merc now and gooing to put it all away for next time.
Dave