Hello,
Sorry for the delay but I've been a touch busy since my return.
Spent a lovely week on Fraser from October 5 to October 12. In short beach fishing was non-existant with weed choking the entire beach from Happy Valley to the Cape.
In the 7 days I was there camped at Waddy Point there were three session available of the rocks where you could fish without maximum weed. (it was still there). Dart were there in their thousands but tailor were very scarce. 30 blokes in our camp (not all of them fishin I'll tell you) with the return of 20-30 tailor total for the entire trip. The Dart-a-thon would have made it into the plural hundreds I would have thought. Myself - well I bagged 7 dart in 10 casts (3 dropped fish) in 12 minutes late one afternoon before I found other pleasures.
So it was with a great deal of satisfaction that I was able to fish offshore courtesy of the big rig Rebait. All in all we had her on the water 6 days.
Sunday: Late afternoon run up to Nagala rocks to set four crab pots and another three out the front of Waddy bay on the coffee rock - nice boat ride.
Monday: blew and rained - forced to drink
Tuesday: Seas 1.8 with 15 knots and rain. Fished in front of Indian for around 40 fish with some standout sweetlip and snapper. About 6 snapps going 5kg plus and 3 sweeties over 6kg. One legal red and a small cobia plus mixed reefies.
Wednesday: Seas 1.5 and 15 knots. Fished same area for greater numbers of fish but quality down. Standouts were some big parrot and some big sweeties.
Thursday: Seas 1 metre and 10 knots. Started fishing Indian but a bit slow so headed out to southern Gardners. Found massive fish life on sounder but hard to fish with current. Finished with 50 reefies but again quality down on day 1.
Friday Seas flat with 5 knots. Straight to Southern Gardners. Nice red throat and moses perch etc but quitened so decided on a troll for a few hours. Trolled skipped gar - bibbed lures - hex heads etc. Over two hours for not a touch fishing the drop off line on the Souther Gardners right to the top of the Northern Gardners. Only 16 fish in esky for day with a raging 3.9 miles an hour current.
Saturday: Seas 1.8 Winds 15 knots and increasing. By the time we'd got to Indian it was 2.5 and 25 knots so turned around and came home.
The bust offs were too numerous to mention but one memorable one was 30 minute fight for me which I think was a massive cod which had us all over the place. A couple of nice cobia went at the boat. There were lots of other things that went WHIZ BANG and that was it. There was also a 12 foot tiger shark which snapped at the heals of my 2kg parrot right on the corner of the boat - the head (shark) even came out of the water. We moved after that.
I think the whales were the highlight. If we saw one we saw 200. Had them surface 5 metres to the right hand side of the boat giving us the eyeball. Had them doing hand stands 50 metres from the boat for about 20 minutes. Made the floater rig pretty quite for most of the trip.
Biggest minus was the C@#*S who stole my (borrowed) crab pots from out the front of Nagala. Four brand new pro pots worth about $80 each, clearly marked with name and contact details in plain site. I'm taking a gun next time - no quams whatsoever.
On the day I was catching nice mixed reefies the pro Greg beside us and the camp on the other side of him were braining the big Reds at North Gardners. Greg landed 14 to 20lb and the other boys landed 7 to 25lb. My biggest was 47cms - oh well.
I think Fraser in the boat might become a regular trip but probably not with these blokes again. Maybe an Ausfish M+G should be in order.
Bugman
"whats the time"