Hadn’t really planned on doing anything on the weekend the way the weather was looking till I caught Brownies on Thursday night. Then it was a quick ring around to see what everyone was doing and to get a trip up and going. All day Friday it was on again off again every three hours as the Bureau forecast changed with locations changing from Mooloolaba to the tip of Fraser to Tin Can Bay as the forecasts changed. Finally Friday night it was on again but with a late start so we could ring the Coastguard at Tin Can Bay first thing Saturday morning.
Saturday morning and I woke to observations of 16 knots at DI Pt and only 8 knots at Sandy Cape – “Dam you Bundy”, we really wanted to fish the top of Fraser but had locked ourselves into fishing Rainbow. By the time the boys dropped round to pick me up there was 13 knots at DI Pt and a call to the Coastguard said there was 2m on the bar but they weren’t breaking. We got the boat on the water and were at the bar at the top of the tide around 12:00 p.m. Being a bit sloppy inside we elected to run the 500m through Fisherman’s Gutter. This was fine so we headed to our bait spot. The Yakkas came in four at a time so we didn’t have to hang around there long then it was a 28 Nm run out to the first spot.
There were no white caps but a lot of slop left over from the day before and we could only make about 16 knots into them in the 5.2 Kevlacat. First couple of spots didn’t look real good so we ended up about 38 Nm off the bar which took a fair few hours to get to. Once there it looked good for deep water jigging with a bit of bait and we were on a spot where we had two almighty hook ups doing it the time before. The 300 gm jigs were sent down then we had an almighty shower of Sauries jumping on top. 30 seconds later and we saw the reason for them going ballistic - a Sail or Sails were smashing them to pieces only 30 metres from the boat. Russ looked at me and I looked at him before we dived into the tackle bag for a couple of live-bait rigs. We only had two rods out of the 10 onboard with mono which happened to be Baitrunners loaded with 8, perfect for pitching some liveys at them. As is the way, by the time we had rigged up and put a livey on the action was gone. We did a couple of laps with the liveys out but it was getting pretty dark by then. Time to anchor up for the night.
With a strong northerly current and the south-easterly slop we were in for an uncomfortable night with the cat sitting side on to them all night. Add the float bouncing around from hull to hull in the tunnel plus keeping watch for the big ships going past all night and it was not the best night I have ever spent in a boat. The motion of a cat was a bit hard to get used to in the dark and Russ and I had succumbed to the cabin by about 7:00. I swapped spots with Bruce around 8:30 and took up my usual position of swagging it on the deck – looking up every now and again to make sure no freighters were bearing down on us. About 3:00 I got up and started fishing as the guts had settled by then. Between then and dawn I only added one Moses to add to Bruce’s and a Hussar for bait. At dawn the other two got up and we had a little session on Parrot before deciding to do some drifting and jigging. Fish to hit the deck were a Gold Spot Wrasse, a Yellow Sweetlip, some Hussar and Moses Perch and some bigger Parrot. We also had some big hits and bustoffs plus we landed a big shark. Quite a few of the things we lost were sharks and we blew a bit of gear between them and the wire weed.
From there we decided to look at the shelf proper and a mark I had for 90 fathoms (162m) of water with the big jigs looking for Pearlies and Amberjack. Conditions by now were perfect for fishing with the lightest of norteasterlies just rippling the surface. Couldn’t see anything out there so we ran back into our spot 6 miles south. On the way in we stumbled across some new ground which we gave a good going over and a spot that needs some further investigation. We headed to our best spot and said we would do a quick few drops before heading in. First drift resulted in a 91cm Snapper to Bruce on a floatline worked close to the bottom and an undersize red. Second drift was a just legal red to Russ and an almighty hookup then bustoff to me on my new Torium outfit and 300 gram jig. The third and last drift resulted in an almighty hookup to Russ which turned out to be a 1.075m AJ and a 75cm Red to Bruce – his first legal one and a beauty around 8kg for his first. We tagged the AJ and sent him on his merry way before cleaning up the boat and heading in about 1:00. About 10 miles out we ran across a bit of a NorEaster and came through the bar on the run-out with no major dramas.
For the trip we did 129Nm by boat for 100litres one side and 90 the other out of the 60 four strokes. Going out was pretty rough and heading in I had the peddle to the metal because it was so flat and we were pushed for time so those are the worst figures you would expect. 1.3-1.4 Nm a litre is bloody good and that 30%+ improvement in fuel economy you see in all the four stroke adds in fishing mags.
Unfortunately these are the only photos at this stage. All of us forgot the digis but we have heaps of excellent stills coming.
"whats the time"
. lee
