First Kingfish
Son Chris called last week to ask if I could take a couple of his mates fishing. A few quick questions and I found out they hadn’t done a lot of fishing – and they’d never caught a kingfish. With good weather scheduled for Sunday, the four of us met at Roseville ramp around 7:00:
The plan was to downrig along the South Head of Sydney Harbour. As mentioned last week, November is prime time for Queensland kingfish travelling south. And this location is a well known stopover for them. First, livebait. Out to the Centurion wreck and connected a burley can to the downrigger. Dropped that down ten metres, and pretty soon we were getting swarmed by massive slimy mackerel and big yellowtail. Note the burley can straight line at ten metres:
Straight over to South Head so we could catch the 8.30 high tide. I hadn’t taken the Minn Kota on purpose. Reason being, I didn’t want to be tempted into using it. I wanted to be running the outboard, so that if we hooked up a big one I could tow the fish into deeper water. Sounds a bit unsporting? Well the reef is only 9 metres down and we would release any big ones we caught anyway. The weather was fantastic and our guests were enjoying the day. Alex on the left, Albert on the right:
Downrigging speed was only 2 – 2.5 knots. So I suggested we run out a Rapala CD too, to see if we could pick up a bonito or a king. It got slammed by a good kingfish – but boatside, the bib tore away from the minnow body:
Some experienced fishos following our Facebook page explained that’s not uncommon:
The prime mission was just to get our visitors hooked up. After a short run down the coast I wound up the downrigger and checked the livebait. Only to find that the (bridled) mackerel had somehow turned the hook around into its head. That had caused it to spin and now it was dead. Time for a change of pace! We dropped the pick on the edge of the reef. I half filled the burley cage with fresh pilchards and dropped it down 10 metres. Just like at the Centurion, good marks appeared on the sounder screen:
I’m finding the burley can off the downrigger is deadly on the livebait grounds, the snapper grounds, and the kingfish grounds. It’s going to be insanely good early next year, when spotted mackerel arrive on the mid-north coast. But one thing to mention? Get the plastic one, not the chrome mesh one they sell at BCF. The metal one looks good but it corrodes like crazy and will leave rusty marks all over your boat. Undersized kings were hitting the strip baits hard. Yes they were small, but our visitors were having a ball on light gear:
I started doing something you might like to try? That is, jigging the burley trail. When you’ve got your burley can set just off the bottom using your downrigger – instead of on the back of the boat using your burley pot – you get ten times the effect. First of all, the rise and fall of the boat jerks and shakes the burley can, distributing chopped up pilchard pieces through the mesh. But best of all, water pressure squeezes oil out of the pilchards. Basically, you’ve got an invisible curtain of oil rising to the surface and drifting downcurrent. With the burley pot, that doesn’t happen. I started jigging the trail with a light combo and a 60 gram jig:
Little ones only but it didn’t matter. Beautiful morning on the water, and the company was great. We let all the kings go and kept a couple of big red rock cod. Chris steamed them up with shallots on Sunday night and reported they tasted great:
Will be out a couple of times at the end of this week chasing bigger ones and will report any interesting happenings live on the Facebook page. Give the burley can and jigging the burley trail a try? Lotsa fun. And I should mention, fast mechanical jigging seems to work way better than slow jigging. Last but not least, please handle these undersize kings carefully. Keep them in the net if possible, don’t let them thrash on the deck, quick pic if you want one then straight back into the water. Good investment for your fishing future. Thanks for reading
Andrew Hestelow
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