Glanville:- We set out this morning for a massive coral flats fishing session to see what we could extract from the reef with the flyfishing tackle. On the way I decided to quickly just catch us some bait to do some chumming up if the fish didn't want to play the game, we stopped on this sexy looking point and I immediately deployed a deep diving minnow which was sure to do the job, and sure enough we had gone 30m and the rod was bending but the sharks had it for breakfast quicker than you could think, we deployed once more and 30m later we were hooked into a screamer, after an intense battle which got down to the bottom of the spool at times we managed to boat a 30kg Spaniard on the light gear... we had our bait and off to the flats we went it didn't take us long before we had fish homing in on the teaser like it was the last feed on earth, we had some cracker fish eat the teaser and everything from big trout to maori wrasse, gts, blue fin and some quality emperors, eventually the things got that excited that I ended up getting bust off in the reef with a lure that had no hooks on it....the guys were just battling to get the flys moving fast enough to get much excitement out of the fish, we decided to change our approach and got some blood in the water shortly after that we had some nice trout and redbass in the berley trail, we got dusted up a few times and managed to get one beast of a redbass to the boat which was a great effort before the tide chased us off the flats. We got some sinking flys in the mix and dredged a deeper shoal and hooked some steamtrain fish that cleaned us up properly we lost 2 flylines and a bunch more flys and in the process boated a 5kg trout a couple more red bass and a nice GT. I would hate to think how many fish we would have caught today if we had some hooks in the teaser...or how much tackle we would have lost there were a hell of a lot of fish about today and we had a great day.
John Dory:- First up this morning we snuck up onto the flats for the last of the run in tide and teased some fish up straight away, unfortunately the ones that found the flies didn't stay connected, as the tide dropped away I dropped the lads onto a coral cay that had most likely never been walked on before and they had a ball casting to small queenfish and various reef fish before Jeff spotted a school of milkfish tailing that just didn't want to play the game before a huge GT swam past him in less than 2 foot of water, this flat was going nuts, to finish the afternoon we caught a couple of 25lb yellowfin on lures for a fresh feed of sashimi tonight, what a great day on the water
Clint: Conditions were ideal to wave the magic wand out there today with light winds and sunny conditions. We started the assault on top of the reef cruising the flats to spot fish. Using a teaser I raised many fish from coral trout to red bass and bluefin trevally but the boys could not seem to set the hooks on anything. Just on the corner of the same reef there was a nice edge that was worth a dredge. We loaded up the heavy fly rods with T-14 and big bombing flies to get down deep to the big arches that were showing up on the sounder. On the first drop John was into something solid there is nothing better than hearing a fly reel screaming off line, though this fish got the better of him and put him on the reef. We did some more passes along the edge and although we did not manage to get the big one we got some nice sharkies. After lunch we hit the edge of the reef back to teasing fish and casting flies this time we manage to raise and set the hooks on a few more fish of from coral trout to gold spot. It was a fun day with plenty of fish sighted but unfortunately the hooks would not set. We will get them tomorrow
