EDIT - here's the videos. The quality isn't great...it takes forever to upload a full res version to youtube. Also the water was so clear that the fish spooked easily hence the boat is often a long way away - so there's plenty of distance and shakey zoom shots.
Also excuse the commentary
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkFs-92tIAw - here's one of my fish. You'll see me struggling to lift the rod at one stage...I seriously could not lift the rod back up from near the water!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4tFAngKAac - - here's MCs fish. Dissapointed about the quality - especially the strike...cant see it very clearly at all. Even the photo I added is blurry!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XXzPzR5xQo- if your net is slow and you only want to watch one vid i'd watch this one. you gotta have a montage. Montage! (or Monatge as it is...)
Well i'm back onboard after spending a week up north with a mate at Cardwell. The first few days were fairly ordinairy weather but it's an amazing spot and blowy weather outside just means you can head into the estuaries. The going was fairly slow - steady, but slow. Highlights were a nice salmon, my first jack, a (small) feed of crab plus a flatty and a stack of grunter. Not the barra we were looking for though.
As we didn't have the internet (everywhere in town seemed to be broken) we didn't really know what was happening with the weather and were playing our trips by ear day by day. Come wednesday though the groundskeeper at the caravan park came over for a chat and mentioned that the weather was glassing out for the next few days. Ecstatic, the days eastuary trip was put on hold and we tracked down a weather report. It was too good to be true - 3 days coming up of 10-15 knots. So, in true fly by the seat of your pants style, we canned the days estuary trip and got ourselves set to hit the outer reef. It was a bout a 50km run, or an hour and a half in my boat. We had never been before and i've never had my boat further than the close by islands around yeppoon. So what do we do? We decide we'd head out at 8:30 that night. 8:30 because the moon should be up and at night because the afternoon breeze would hopefully have dropped out and we couldn't wait for the next day to be out there. So packed, with all precautions taken and enough spare fuel to see us to new guinea we were off.
Was a good run out - hour and a half or there abouts and smooth enough to sip a beer (providing you were observant of the larger swell lest you take your front teeth out with the bottle). Get out there, find a spot showing fish in 40m of water, drop the handline down and BANG. Woohoo
, a nice nannygai.
For a while it was a fish a drop but not to the standard of the first fish, got sharked plenty and then at around 3:00 my mate hooks up to a nice fish. Played for about 10 minutes, get colour and its red!! Bloody huge chinaman fish - arggghh. Still a nice fish but not the emporer we were after. After that had a lie down - a pillow each and one person each side of the console and dozed until first light. Today was the day for testing the new outfit and popping for GTs Shimano T-Curve GT Special with Stella 10000, 80lb Tuf Line XP and 130lb leader. My mate was keen but not enough to shell out the dollars and so had the best GT popping outfit in his arsenal ready to go - an old ABU5000, 50lb braid and 7-10kg ugly stick
We hadn't done it before and were a little lost where to start. We found a nice bommie though and soon hooked up - bang lost fish - what the?? Bring the lure in and my Owner Jobu 7/0 is snapped clean off!! What - these things are supposed to be the business?!?!Rig up with two more and same thing - eventually hook up again and this time both Jobus are snapped clean in half! Insert huge string of expletives right here. It must be a bad batch or something right? Either way i'm taking them back...
Anyway I whip some trebles off another lure and get back in the game. We end up with 5 GTs landed from the boat for the day - bloody awesome. Anyway by 2:30 in the arvo we are buggered and head back in - the ocean still glassed out Anyway - this aint kayak fishing is it
We got back to the mainland and felt like drunken soldiers - without having consumed a drop. 20hrs on the water had given us a real wobble. Anyway we had such a ball the first day we figured the only way it could be topped - and on our last day of fishing - was to chase GTs, on poppers, in the kayak So thats what we did.
Conditions were even better than the previous day. I was able to sit on the floor of the boat (5.4m centre console) and change trebles and de-barb hooks on the trip out.
We were out there in an hour and a bit and the yak was deployed. One person manning the boat and the other on the hunt. We had quickly figured out that by chasing the schooling blue fusiliers along the reef edges we would soon find GTs. You usually only got one cast per school though, the water was so clear that even with the yak to sneak up on them they quickly spooked.
I hooked up first cast but dropped it. After that it took a bit of work and I changed between a 20cm river to sea popper and the lure that did the damage on day one (nomad stickbait) and then back to the popper. After that its a bit of a blur of hook-ups, landed fish, chasing schooling bait and watching manta rays. Not to mention being in the boat carelessly tossing slices out the back to catch some mackeral or sight fishing (believe it or not) to a red emporer by dropping a metal slice down to it in about 7 metres of water only to get cut off on the reef!
Anyway I ended up with 3 GTs from the yak and my mate MC with 2 GTs. I'm not sure on the size, we didn't measure or weigh them, just released as soon as we had some footage and a photo or two. I have the digital footage but it's on my laptop (with a flat battery). I couldn't wait any longer to put the report up though so the video will come later on - it's worth the wait though.
Anyway - thats my first ever GT popping trip and I had a ball. I thought I got some good size fish but looking at the shoalwater trip - crikey there are big fish out there hey. So that's where we're off to next, its just up the road so shoalwater here we come
