Wild Weather, Wild Fish

6.00AM on Sunday morning and I’m picking up Oscar and Xavier at Turramurra railway station. All three of us keen as mustard to fish on James Taylors’ big, beautiful 32-foot Blackwatch, ‘Black Rat’:

Only downside being the horrible forecast. Rain, and a 20 knot wind from the south. First stop, the Valiant wreck off Barrenjoey. Plenty of bait there:

Heading north-east – the original plan – would have been crazy. With Sydney’s recent weather being almost always worse than forecast, going with the wind would have been disaster. Who knew how strong it would get, meaning how tough it would be to beat back into it? The only possible call was to turn south and head for Long Reef. But we didn’t have to go that far:

The Ovens is a famous land based game spot between south Whale beach, and north Avalon. As we drew level with it we saw that a big eddy from the south had pushed flotsam – and huge schools of whitebait – up into the corner. Small tuna were busting through the mix in their hundreds. We started with skirted lures:

And long narrow minnows:

They were hitting everything. It was light tackle heaven! I kept a few for shark bait:

Kept an eye on the sounder as we chased the bust ups. Some fish hanging down deep:

I swapped to a jig:

Xavier and Oscar with their juvenile samsons. All good! Our 3000 and 4000 reels matched the fish size. The light tackle delivered some great battles:

Now lads, on that topic. I was at Anaconda this week and walked past their racks of cheap rod and reel combos:

Do yourself a favour and avoid these little reels. Why? The horrible little reel knobs – or really, plastic tabs – which, unless you’ve got a tiny hand, have to be held by the fingertips. That might work for trout or whiting. Not for kings and samson fish:

The only reason these little spinning reels have these horrible handles is to cut production costs. Our Lesson 3000 reel comes with carbontex drags, a full spool of (your choice) 3 kilo or 6 kilo braid – and a comfortable aluminium handle. Here’s one of my dinged up Lessons delivering punishment to a small king:

Check them out here. For $120 including rod reel and line, you can’t go wrong:

602 LIGHT COMBO

Reds underneath the kings and sambos. We kept five, to 45cm:

Such a top morning’s sport with a great bunch of blokes. Big thanks to James for inviting us aboard Black Rat and looking forward to doing it all again soon
Andrew Hestelow

Also in Tackle News