The Fiji Autumn has seen some excellent popper casting and deepwater jigging conditions which have lead anglers to some great fishing around Kadavu island.
Frequent GTs over 30kg and several over the 40kg mark. We are averaging about 10 GTs per angler per day with numerous other species thrown in as by-catch such as Bluefin trevally, emperors, green jobfish, grouper, big barracuda, mackerel and all the other usual tropical reef popper predators.
Although we have mostly concentrated on the popper casting, we have also recently been doing quite a bit of exploring with the jigging gear using 50lb and 80lb class tackle. Its a good opportunity to take a break from hours of working big poppers and have some fun with the jigs.
The outer reef slopes around Kadavu have offered up some spectacular dogtooth tuna. Average size has been around 75lbs but the trophy fish of the month goes to angler Bill Busch from the USA and his monster 90Kg doggie. A new Fiji All-Tackle Record.
The best poppers recently have been the big I cup Hammerheads, Craftbaits and FCLs. Colour has not seemed to be so important in the past month but we have noticed that lures with banding coloration (eg orange/white/orange/white bands) don't seem to be doing so well drawing less strikes.
The poppers are still outperforming the stickbaits by at least 4-1. Seems the GTs here still prefer a big noisy crashing popper to a twitching swimbait.
The bite is still good but we expect the weather conditions to turn more breezy as winter moves in and there won't be so many of those glassy calm days in the coming few months. Whilst Bite Me will tend to do more light tackle fishing on the wahoo and pcific sailfish, we will still be throwing a few poppers when we get the chance.
