At the boat ramp early Friday morning and just had a feeling it was going to be a great day. Firstly, a top crew – old hand Drax, and new guy Marcus. Secondly, a light tail wind in the morning - and a nor’ easter around lunchtime to bring us home with a wind on our tail. That’s important, when you’re planning a 60 nautical mile round trip. First stop, our sneaky new live bait spot. The usual offshore bait ground only holds giant yellowtail at this time of year because the bonito, kingfish and taylor have chased all the small ones away. The small ones are what the big kings and mahi want. But the bite had shut down and we only put one tiny little yellowtail in the tank! With a long run to our target location, I decided that would have to do.
With just one bait in the tank success would depend on jigging. Drax set up on the bow – which helps keep the Minn Kota prop in the water if seas are choppy. Down went the jig and it didn’t take long:
A solid king on an old battered Downrigger Shop jig. Unfortunately we are out of these until our new shipment arrives:
At the stern I took up the starboard position and Marcus was jigging on the portside. A chunky 98cm hooked up:
The kings at this spot are a good size. We caught five over 90cm, including three over a metre. Marcus scored the fish of the morning, a 104cm:
Note that we put all the big ones back. We’re fishing deep water, so Drax jigs while his electric reel is retrieving. On hook up, he fights the fish in the usual way. That didn’t take long either:
The kings just kept on coming:
But as so often happens here, the bite tapered off fast. I was marking kings on the sounder! But you can bounce a jig of their nose sometimes – without a strike. Having learnt over the summer that persevering after the fish go quiet is a waste of time, we decided to switch to chasing mahi. Down to a spot where I’d marked some trap buoys the week before. The current wasn’t raging but with a water temp of 25.3C I was pretty confident there’d be a few around. There was:
It’s hard to honestly test tackle on a hot bite. I often laugh at the Instagram videos of some influencer fishing with a hundred dollar stick bait at some incredibly remote Queensland reef. When they hook up to a big GT they give credit to the stick bait – even though in the wild spots you could probably catch one with a hook rigged thong. But our 45 gram jig was deadly on Friday:
What I do is, when trying to compare lures success, is judge it against one other fishos on that boat are using. These little jigs cast out of sight on our 802 combo with a 3000 size reel and 6 kilo line. Pretty sure the big flash from the prismatic sides and the mylar skirt on the hook is spotted by mahi a long way away:
The reason being, why else do they hook up on the second or third flick of the rod tip? I reckon they hear the splash and spot the flash. Check them out here:
Most of the mahi were legal but we were confident there were some better ones around. So we ran out a couple of garfish on Head Starts. That got us slightly bigger fish but not the metre jobs we were hoping for:
Out again soon and will report in if anything interesting happens. Thanks for reading
Andrew Hestelow