Another week at Port but now that the competition season is over it has become the quiet fishing village it was, the crowds are gone but the fish are still here.

I went out wide on Saturday to see if I could find a Blue only to find the water had changed and was cooler than the previous couple of days so I moved back in closer to the shelf where I picked up a nice Striped Marlin of around 80 kgs. on a lure which over the last couple of weeks has outperformed my favourite ‘lumo’.

Continuing South down the shelf there was increasing talk on the radio about a build up of bait on the edge. On arriving in the area  we were greeted with the sight of three boats all hooked up and fighting –  memories of several years ago when the Car Park was figuratively a car park.

I found the bait, it wasn’t hard, but after several jigs we only managed two Slimies and lots of yellowtail. We rigged the Slimies for skipping and proceeded to work around the bait. After about ten minutes I marked a fish and as I called out to the crew it struck but after a decent run for some reason it didn’t hook up.  We spent some more time skipping with no action and so in desperation we dropped a  Yellowtail down to the bait.

To cut a long story short the deep bait took off and we were attached to another nice Stripy which was dutifully tagged and let go. We managed one more hit which I’m sure was a shark but with two Marlin under our belt we headed for home.

The weather predictions for Monday were not good but we went out anyway and made our way back to 52′  where  unlike on Saturday there was no bait at all. I did hear that boats fishing on the previous day had found the bait another fifteen miles South. However we persisted for quite a while to no avail and because the wind was picking up again I started working North to give ourselves a half decent run home.

Tight Lines,
Ivan