24 Hours On The Water
Down to the boat ramp on Thursday night with a poorly thought out plan for a solo overnight squid session and a dawn kingfish run. Remembered to pack the swag and a massive amount of tackle, but forgot to take food or ice. At least the old tinnie, which I’ve had for thirty years, was ready to go:
Out to Broken Bay hoping I could jig a few kingfish on the Valiant wreck before dark. Here’s the marks:
But once over the wreck saw it was stacked with incredible numbers of slimy mackerel:
Of course I grabbed a few for bait before heading back in to set up for the night:
Into The Basin, on the western side of Pittwater. Found a spare mooring at the head of the bay and tied on. Connected the squid light to the battery and dropped it over the side. Even though it was well before dark, everything worked great:
Dropped some pilchards in the burley bucket, thinking that might add interest. It worked too well!
Have a look at this, from when I woke up around 1:00AM. I’m guessing this many fish would frighten the squid away?
They really are amazing, and they make squid fishing so easy. Check them out here:
Up next morning at six and turned on the phone, only to find I had missed a stack of messages from Fitz. He’s a real earlybird. Picked him up at Palm Beach wharf and ran down the coast to the Coolooli wreck. Here’s the marks:
It was on fire:
I used one of our $6 140 gram jigs. Got three kings in the first three drops – but all just under the legal length of 65cm. Happy with how things had gone, but hoping to find some bigger fish, we headed down to Long Reef. I put a garfish on a Head Start and trolled that, ten metres behind the spreader bar. The water was a clear warm blue:
From then on things went crazy. We caught them on our 40 gram leaf jigs:
On Head Starts – used up all our garfish baits!
And even on our mini poppers:
But every fish was in the 60 – 70cm range. We could have kept some but decided to let them all go: What a day! And, night. Back up to Pittwater as the north easterly started to pick up. Quick swim to cool off, put the boat back on the trailer, and headed for home. Still on a high. Doing it again soon, this time fishing overnight the bull sharks in the Harbor everyone’s talking about if you’d like to join me, please get in touch? We could raft up overnight while fishing for sharks. And squid! Thanks for reading
Andrew Hestelow
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