We're back! The next three weeks of charter are Lagoon Explorers at Bugatti for a week, then down to Elusive, and then the last week we're working our way back from Elusive through Bugatti to Mackay. This week we have a group of mates from Brisbane onboard with us. There are some experienced fishermen amongst the group but many haven't done a lot of fishing before. C.
Damon:- Weather was not too bad today, and we headed north with high hopes. My guys wanted to do a bit of trolling today, and we started the day with a fun session catching shark mackerel, Spanish mackerel and a 20kg GT while trolling the light gear around the reef edge. The outgoing tide was making the reef edge a bit rough, so we went into the shallows and drifted around in 1-2m of water catching cortal trout, stripeys, big longtom, red throat emperor, and getting spooled through the reef by one very large GT. There were heaps of bludger trevally up in the shallows, and these were also great fun. Lunch was back at the mothership, and then out again with only 2 guys. We had a go for GTs in the arvo, and Sandy landed a beautiful 35kg GT within 20 minutes of starting. Peter then followed this up with a 25kg specimen and the guys were pretty well exhausted by this stage. We went back into the shallows and finished the day catching heaps of bludger trevally and coral trout on the light gear. Very relaxed and fun day.
Nick Report :- We set out today to get our rods bent on anything. We started off about 500 meters from the mothership having our first few casts of the morning we had a couple of interested GTs come and investigate what all the commotion was about that was being made by our poppers but weren't totally commited. So we decided to head to another section of reef to the west to go and chuck some light gear around, there were bunces of tightly packed birds with there eyes penetrating the surface below them looking ever looking but much to our dismay it was only patches of white bait getting terrorised by them. We chucked out a few minnows and started trolling up the reef edge where we got stuck into a nice gold spot travelly, shark mackerel and while winding in the other rod we hooked up with a nice GT which eventually got the better of us. After lunch our plans were to stick close as the sea was pretty cheeky so we drifted around on the flats getting stuck into coral trout, stripies, and cod. There was a lot of flying fish on the outside of the reef getting harassed so we grabbed our GT stuff and we managed to get boat two nice GTs to end the day.
Glanville Report :-First day of charter and the excitement of the new guests is infectious, staying out for the full day i decided to run a few miles to the North to a particular part of the reef where few of us have ventured. It turned out to be a little disappointing and had all the features in the reef for a run in tide place, we managed to find a corner where some bait had been tightly packed into and had an hour of good action catching 3 Gts and having many more takes I continued with my plan to fish our way back to the anchorage and throughout the day we saw Gts and picked them off one by one and at 4pm we upped lines as I started the journey home which got rudely interrupted by Bludger Trevally, and hundreds of them, on top of the reef flats the bludger were going off their nuts and after catching about 20 in a half an hour with perpetual triple hook ups we decided to end off an already great day on an exceptional note with 8 Gts up to 28kg, a basket full of other species and great company it in deed was an enjoyable day.
Chris:- I started the day by heading to a reef a few miles away. As soon as we could see the reef all I could see was clouds of birds. I thought right game time. I moved across the shallows and it was "bludger mania" one after the other, double, triple and quad bending it was a very very action packed day. And it wasn't only the bludgers but trout after trout, shark mackerel, stripies, GTs, longtail and mac tuna, there was so so much variety of species all on this one reef. We had a great day on the light stuff and will be one to remember..
