Hi guys,
Some mates and I went out wide off Sydney on Saturday following reports that the yellowfin were back with the warm current that had pushed down from the north.
We headed out and set the spread to find the fish about 12 miles out. By the time we hit 16 miles we had a double hook up on 'fin (having run into sime small stripeys before that).
We started a berley trail. A few of us (me included) pulled a few fish on bait, but with the fish seeming pretty thick a few of us threw on some metal jigs and one guy put on a plastic.
In no time we had landed some yellowfin and small albacore on both the jigs and the plastic. They were not huge fish, probably averaging around 10-12kg, although the largest for the day at 15kg was taken on plastic. We landed some 20 yellowfin, 4 or 5 albacore and a few small striped tuna at this spot, about 75% on jigs and plastics.
Once things quietened down and the fish left we trolled over to Browns Mountain were one guy picked up another tuna on the cubes. I was using a pink 230 gram River2Sea jig. After being taunted by the charter skipper who said he wanted Blue Eye or Gemfish for dinner I asked how deep we were. Approx 500m was the answer.
Not one to shy from a challenge, and overly optimistic frim our earlier success, I starte letting out a lot of line...I got about 400m out before I sensibly decided that with current my 230g jig would not reach bottom, even with the 600m odd of braid on the Stella 20000 spool.
I started a jig retrieve and after less than 50m something jumped on solid! You could have knocked me over with a feather, and some of the other guys who had been laughing wiped the smiles off really quick, because the fishing had become very slow.
The retrieve was a mongrel, luckily this was no monster although it did manage to take a small amount of drag and almost run me under the boat when I got it to the surface..it was an albacore around the 6 or 7kg mark. I proceeded to hook up and land the same sort of fish on my next 5 drops into the 300 - 400m zone. This made the guys who wanted to take some albacore home very happy and was an interesting end to the day.
All in all we landed around 40 fish between 6 of us and the conditions were good so it was just a lot of fun. I also got to try out my new Smith AMJ 54M with my stella 20000, neither of which has seen anything other than a rat kingfish yet, and I was really pleased with the way the outfit went. I am confident of landing some serious fish on it over summer and next year in New Caledonia.
Oh, and next time, I will make sure I have some heavier jigs and lighter line for more capacity, because i am pretty sure I could get a Gemfish to take a jig.....
