Like Peter said with week one Brandon is pretty busy at the moment so i thought i would put up a report for the second week
The second week of the Trip organised by Brandon consisted of Brandon ( second week) Luke Peters, Rob Ciotucha,
Chris Young (of Full Scale Lures fame), Martin Excel, Ken Best, David Huang, Sunny Fan, Cai Caiyang, Kasey Leong, Dominique
Draux and myself
Well the week started off with a bang as we all enjoyed meeting each other with most of us for the first time, and knocking back a few beverages at the Tavern on Hamilton Island, then later a few more back at the motel until the early hours of the morning
early flights the next morning meant that there were a few sore heads as the first group boarded the sea plane for our trip to the reef at about 6:30 am with the impending forecast of 30kt winds and rain !! the first flight went off without a hitch, the second flight was a completely different story with at least one of the guys having a word to the big guy in the sky and later finding out the pilot did also
Once the fishing started all was forgotten as everyone got down to casting poppers and stickbaits at everything that moved in the ocean, the fishing was quite spectacular at times and other times fairly slow but overall i think everyday someone saw a fish of at least 40kg either swipe or eat a lure, the highlight of my trip (fishing wise anyways) was a day that Cai, Rob and myself were fishing with Damon and we snuck into this Blue hole that looked pretty good only to see and hookup to some massive fish without landing any we saw maybe 5 fish between 40 an 50kg and seeing one that was definately bigger again
it was amazing !!! there was a huge variety of lures that caught fish with one day most of the bites coming from stickbaits and then the next they would mostly eat poppers ( thats fishing hey
!!)
The variety of species caught was pretty awesome with various mackeral species, reef fish from the mothership, bludgers, and tunas underneath the birds to some different catches like Mahi Mahi and a Yellowfin Tuna of about 15kg caught on a Fusilier school on the shallow edge of a reef and the everpresent Red bass which when they were found were thick and on the last day a school of Dogtooth Tuna showed up sitting underneath us as we cast for GT but were not really in a feeding mode the biggest one we saw was around the 20 to 25kg mark which after some convincing Glanville decided to drop a fly down for a brief hookup
The group that was on board was amazing we all got on so well with the sledging coming thick and fast each day and even more so on the mothership at night, there were some new awards given out that differed from the first week that came about from some of the incidents that happened each day on the boats
Cai won the "L" shaped award ( which i am sure you will get the idea of when some of the pictures are posted ) and i won the MC award ( unable to elaborate on a public forum)
The main awards are as follows Biggest GT Ken Best @ 45kg (super effort) , best angler (voted by the guides) Martin Excel, best other capture Rob Ciotucha 30kg Spanish Mackeral, Smallest GT Cai Caiyung 49.5cm fork length ( cant believe one was caught smaller than mine
) Best capture on mothership Kasey Leong was 7 to 8ft shark most improved during the week
Luke Peters. another capture worth mentioning was Brandons 25kg GT on 30lb braid and same day catching the 15kg Yellowfin
I could go on for days about some of the great times that we spent on the boat, and some of the stories (some were even true
) that were told over a beer at night but i will leave it to the guys to add there favorite moments from the trip as they see fit
On behalf of the guys on week 2 i would like to congratulate Brandon for organising such a great weeks fishing and also to the Nomad crew for making the week so enjoyable and easy
unfortunately my computer will take about 24 hours to download all the pictures so i will leave it to the other guys on the trip to start adding pictures when they get a chance and i will add some once they are all downloaded
Guys feel free to add anything that i have missed
Cheers
