Woke up this morning after a bit of a pissy night with no real intention of heading out but the weather looked sweet. Too good of an opportunity to miss so we headed out to see what we could find. First thing we fished some completely new ground that looked pretty sweet. Didn't take long to get an inquiry and it turned out to be a nice Coral Trout about 60cm but the hooks didn't stick. Found HEAPS of nervous fusiliers and had plenty of casts but no GTs. I'm very keen to head back there during an earlier stage of the tide when most of the reef is exposed and fish the edge of the drop off.
We pushed on to some other familiar ground close by where we've gotten destroyed before. First cast and I had a little swipe by a little GT but that was it for that spot as we didn't see any signs of life after that.
We moved onto another spot that we've fished before. We worked our way round to an area that's produced for us in the past and when we finally reached it one of my casts was right on the money with a GT ferociously nailing my craftbait GT realbait. This fish went on a MASSIVE run under very heavy drag through some snotty bomby infested ground and I thought I was done for. I frantically palmed the spool to try and put some extra pressure on and my spool was almost hot enough to fry an egg. Amazingly, I managed to stay connected and unscathed. He slowed, and I got a couple of turns on the handle before he went on another long run and I thought it was all over as he cruised through some water barely a couple of metres deep. Again, my line didn't find reef and I slowly started putting line back on my Stellas spool which had a scary amount of line missing. We got out into some deeper water and after another couple of short runs near the boat I got him in. I was really expecting quite a large fish as he fought much harder than alot of 30kg fish I've caught but I was quite surprised and he came out at 104cm fork length and around 25kg. He really fought WAY out of his weight class and took more line than any GT I've got ever.
After that we decided to have a few more casts before heading back home while it was still early. Finally broke the hoodoo, been ages since I nailed a decent GT off Dampier.
