Hey guys, last week I had the absolute pleasure of fishing Jewell Reef with the Nomad boys. Some of you would have seen the updates in their section of the website.
We had an amazing week despite persistent 20-25knt winds. The light tackle fishing varied from very good to insane, with some boats landing 100 fish a day, an many of them serious quality for the shallows. The GT fishing was also very consistent to excellent at times. For example on the last mornings fishing in 3 hours myself and 2 other anglers landed 12 GT, a few spaniards and some other bycatch. I managed a run of 3 fish landed from 3 casts at one stage (which, on day 6, left me a little broken!). We missed several as they were coming off a deep shoal and when they hit the lures they ran straight at the boat, making a hook set hard, but it was still pretty awesome.
All in all it was just a terrific week. I landed 41 GT plus who knows how many long nosed emperor, yellow lipped emperor, bluefin, trout, boat fish...the list goes on. The only thing I didn't land for the week was my dream fish of a big Maori Wrasse. One was landed of about 40kg on a popper by another angler, and on the same day the same angler landed one about 18kg in the shallows, extracting it from the other side of a bommie after it had bricked him on the 40lb gear! Amazing. The numbers of wrasse were insane, and ironically I was the only person on board who did not land one (even a small one!) all week!!
The average size of GT was a little on the smaller side, there were a lot of fish caught in the 10-20kg range, quite a few in the 20-30, and probably half a dozen from 30-40kg. My biggest for the week was only about 30kg but the sheer number and the way the fish were caught (in doubles, triples, aerial strikes etc) still made it really awesome.
We also had the distinct pleasure of finding some mobile bommies. It is hard to imagine until you have seen a school of GT that, from a distance, literally turns the water green. A 2 metres well would come up and you could see 40 or 50 GT surfing down it. Epic. We found this huge school two days in a row on Saltaire, both at exactly the same time of day but on different edges. There must have been over a thousand GT in it. You will see part of it in one of the pics below. One of teh guys got some pretty good underwater video which I am hoping to get my hands on in due course, including popper strikes. Awesome.
We also experienced the next day on Tight STick with Johnny Racoon, the GT master, smaller mobile bommies on an inside edge, two on the one edge of a few hundred fish each. This was epic. We thought the second one was milkfish until I did teh milkfish v GT test - throw a popper and watch it detonate! At first what looked like about a dozen fish just saw more and more coming from the deep until there were two hundred or so and 4 anglers experiencing quadruple bending! Pretty hectic stuff.
It was another great week of service by the Nomad crew and a week's fishing I will never forgt. Time for some pictures to do the talking.
