Myself and my keen popping mad fishing buddys meet at 4.30am fri to head out to a few local reefs in search of that big one. contitions were better than perfect, didnt see a wind line till 5pm when we headed home. The fishing started off abit slow as the sun was only just cracking the horizon when we got to our first location, we managed to land afew macks with the stick baits and some 6-10kg GTs, we moved on from that location as the bait wasnt in large numbers, Next two locations were similar as the bait wasnt thick or being worked. Pete managed to have a cracker of a hit off the top of the reef from a large trout, hooked up for a short time till it managed to free its self(fin fish closure we say)
pulled up at location 3 where the bait schools were thick in numbers, we were casting cubera 150, GT mania 130, orion stick baits, and skipjack 150. our poppers didnt get a look at the first few bait schools till we hit the other side of the reef, cast after cast we had hook ups and striks landing fish between 6-20kg, had one GT come out of the water 4-5 times hitting the cubera with no hook up(till next time), plenty of great action. had a tripple hook up at one stage and plenty of double hook ups. pulled a beautiful blue fin gt, amazing colours. while the lads were landing a fish i saw a bait school pop right up behind the boat, grabbed my new xzoga PE10 rigged with a stella 18k and weapon of distruction was a skipjack 150. cast, splash, bail arm down, first pop(AKA turkey slapped the skipjack) BOOF, fish on. i knew this fish wasnt any 6-20kg like the rest we had been catching that day. He had afew hard runs till i started getting some line back on him. I finally got to experience what a mid-large GT felt like, hands down to you blokes landing 50kg+. got the fish onboard after a good tough fight, PB fish for myself. the beast was released and swam away to grow bigger. didnt have any scales on board as i would have liked to weigh him, any ideas to what this fish may have come in at?
we had singles and trebles on our poppers/stickbaits but found the trebles with a skipbait had better success rate on the day. I couldnt have been happier with the xzoga rod on its first trip, light weight, easy to cast and loads up great. Value for money i say coming in just over $600. finds the big ones too ;-)
After afew more location moves, alot more action with GT's, Macks and the one other 20kg+ fish saw us heading back for the port of Townsville. Great day fishing.
