A weather change and not the best tides meant the fishing was always going to be hard going. Snelly and I had the boat in the water at a decent hour after leaving Cairns around 4.30 am. The Northerly was still blowing early so we changed plans of heading towards Missionary bay and came back inside the channel.
We decided to have a quick lure at a wreck almost opposite the boat ramp on the island side. First cast I had a large fish scythe through the water and hook up. First cast, how good does it get. After a prolonged fight a massive queenfish came to the boat, estimated weight around 11 kilos, a pb.
It turned out we were still a fair distance from the wreck and the cast was merely to a school of bait on the mud, lucky cast.
The fishing went quiet a bit before snelly started braining them. First up was a Jack, followed by several Barra including one keeper for dinner at 64 cm, a nice one in the 70's lost in the snags also. I finally managed my first Barra at around 3pm after catching several hundred trees beforehand.
One of the highlights of the day was a couple of Barra striking and missing the lures before snelly dropped a soft plastic in right on top of the snag. Immediately he had a hit with the tail being bitten off. A quick replacement saw another instant hit with a nice Barra around 64 cm being wrestled at arm's length out of the snag, awesome stuff!
Another funny moment was when we decided to move to another bank after landed a few cod and barracuda. Snelly makes a call of "yeah no worries I'll just pull a barra out of this snag and we'll head off" which he did first cast! nice call.
The total for day 1 was 7 barra along with the queenie, one Jack and a variety of other species.
Day 2 saw a couple of Barra within the first few snags, snelly pulling one on his third cast. Things went quiet again after that but we managed 5 Barra for the day. I missed a large fish, possibly a Jack that totally smashed the lure and raced through the mangroves before I could even blink.
So a dozen Barra for our boat along with around 15 other fish of various species made for a good trip in the end for us.
A great weekend and I'm looking forward to the next one with all the guys. Good to put faces to names and I hope we can do it again sometime.
Cheers, Mark
The first cast hehehe
