Deep In The Heart Of Texas

Tickled pink to be invited on a run in James’ big beautiful ‘Black Rat’ on Saturday! Up to the marina early, and super impressed with this Surtees parked in the yard:

Hawkesbury River brown and murky, after even more heavy rain recently:

First job – untangle the sabikis, before we reached the Barrenjoey live bait spot:

Up to Texas Reef, east of Terrigal. Some good mark on the Garmin but not exactly what we were looking for. For kings, you want irregular disorganised marks. I predicted these evenly distributed schools would be the super tasty and highly valued pink perch:

This reef is a wide area of bumps and lumps and you never know exactly where the kingfish will be hanging. Our method is to keep moving – and drop jigs on either obvious marks showing kings, or bait stacks thick enough to attract our target fish. Like all the deep reefs, tide is important. As we moved towards the high things started to pick up. Here’s Drax, hooked up on his new electric reel. The electric function is used only for jigging – not fighting:

The fish measured 81cm and went straight into the kill tank:

Jig used was our pink 250 gram model. Ours come in five colours:

Deadly, on the 100 metre reefs. You don’t want a flutter or bent jig in those depths. Especially not on a flybridge game boat, where every breath of wind accelerates the boat drift. You just want to get to the bottom fast – before you move away from the marks on your screen. More info here:

250 GRAM JIGS = 10 FOR $95 INC DELIVERY

Drifting along with skipper James keeping a wary eye on the sounder, as always. That paid off, big time. Suddenly he called out, ‘fish at 40 metres!’ the blokes who had their jigs down deep wound up fast. The blokes who had their jigs on top dropped down fast. Everyone hooked up to kingfish – excepting me, who was bait fishing for pink perch:

Stefano hooked up on his popping rod:

Fish not big - but it fought all the way to the boat, like kings do:

Top bloke and good mate Murray McGuire out there with friend Wayne, in his perfectly set up Bar Crusher:

Murray’s been the subject of many kingfish capture pics on our Facebook page. On Saturday, he didn’t make it to the reef until after high tide, making things hard. He texted this pic of a nice John Dory taken by Wayne:

With the bite backing off after the tide change, we decided to give ourselves an early mark. The Terrigal FAD hasn’t been deployed yet but, on the way home, we stopped at some lobster trap buoys for a cast or two. Water temp 18.6 degrees so I was surprised to see three small mahi on the floats already. What a top day! Fishing with good blokes, in good weather, and everyone got a feed to take home. I selected these two perch, knowing they’re absolutely delicious:

Stef took a kingie fillet and made it into something special:

He writes:

Nice. I’ll be out again later in the week if the forecast holds true. Tight lines to all our readers
Andrew Hestelow

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