Weipa trip

[Screaming_Eagle]

A belated report from my trip to Weipa in October. It took a while to get the photos together (a small sample of which is attached) and then Christmas came around...Anyways, here goes.

The trip up (and back) was long and tough. 3 days' solid driving each way on sometimes sh*&house roads. Some of the scenery was awesome, particularly around Port Douglas and a few spots on the inland tracks. We blew a few boat-trailer tyres, snapped the main support shaft on the trailer, broke a windscreen and a few other bits and pieces - but we made it there and back.

Weipa is interesting - big mines, fishing, pig hunting and not much else.

All up we (Rod and me) caught somewhere between 600-700 fish including fingermark, gold spot cod, black spot cod, stripeys, queenfish, coral trout, barracuda, longtail tuna, mac tuna, scad, spanish mackerel, shark mackerel, blue salmon, king threadfin salmon, mangrove jack, golden trevally, giant trevally, big-eye trevally, tea-leaf trevally, brassy trevally, blubberlip, grunter, bull shark, pikey bream, tuskfish, saratoga, archer fish, sooty grunter, black jewfish, estuary cod, qld groper...and that's all I can remember.

Highlights of the trip included:
- casting over shallow reef. We caught a lot of fish and got busted-up by some bigguns too. I had a 80-100cm fingermark on for a few seconds - it grabbed my snpaback and headed for home, only for the hook to pull;
- the few occasions when we found tuna on the surface. And then watching the sharks smash the hooked tuna off the surface;
- having to stop jigging the pylons because your arms were burning from pulling in trevally, after trevally, after trevally;
- a hot bite on the freshwater of the wenlock when the barra and sooties went mad for an hour or so. We had only caught the odd barra to that point and then the water temp hit 30 and they went nuts;
- finding a dead tree in the middle of a river and jigging it to catch all manner of species including fingermark, barramundi, mangrove jack, king salmon, queenfish, and mac tuna (I kid you not - and it was past the first rock bar); and
- we stopped in at peter faust on the way back and caught some 1m+ barra.

thanks to everyone who assisted in our preparation by answering questions posted to this site.

I'll try to work out how to post some photos.

SE

[Screaming_Eagle]

apparently all my photos have too many kilobytes to post - so unless some kind soul can tell me how to fix that (if it's possible), then no pics

[philip_thomson]

that sounds like one awesome trip. huge variety of fish both good eating and good fisghting fish.

check out in the chat board help section there should be a post about downsizing images. it does work if u just do what it says.

cheers phil

[Mick]

Struth screaming eagle! Where are the whiting?

[Screaming_Eagle]

mick - we did catch a few unmentionables , southern species that one would be happy to get in the bribie passage, but not in nth qld

[Screaming_Eagle]

faust barra

[Screaming_Eagle]

faust barra

[Screaming_Eagle]

cod

[Screaming_Eagle]

fingermark

[Screaming_Eagle]

golden trevally

[Screaming_Eagle]

qld groper

[Screaming_Eagle]

mangrove jack

[Screaming_Eagle]

spanish mackeral

[Screaming_Eagle]

queenfish

[Screaming_Eagle]

tea leaf trevally