G'day fellas,
As many of you may recall, I have been making some lures for a trip to the Whitsundays. Well, the oft-mentioned trip has been and gone, and my brothers and I have just got back. I thought I'd better give you a rundown of what happened......
My specific mission was to give my latest home made lures a good swim, and hopefully knock over a few GTs along the way. On previous trips, we had seen and hooked some quality fish, but due to inadequate gear and inexperience, we could not land them. However, having obtained a Stella 10000FA and GT Special outfit for this mission, I felt we now had a better chance than ever.
From our point of view, we had unprecedented success, both in terms of fish landed, and the apparent efficiency of my lures. All up, I think we had 17 GT hookups, for 9 fish landed. Most fish I estimated were around 15kg sort of class, a couple bigger, and one smaller. Not big by GT standards I know, but you must bear in mind that (a) we are relatively new to the GT game, and (b) most of our fishing is done from the rocks, which makes landing fish even more difficult.
Interestingly, we discovered a fighting technique through trial and error that certainly contributed to our success, and this was to let the fish run away from the rocks on hookup, then when the fish was a bit more clear of the close bommies, we would suddenly pour on the pressure on the fish through massively increased drag, and aggressive rod work. This seemed to almost stun the fish into submission quite quickly, and most fights were brutal tug-of-wars, lasting less than 5 minutes.
Of the 17 hookups, 12 were on my home made lures, but the best fish of the trip and my PB, a beast which I estimated to be 30kg plus, took one of my sinking fusilier imitation stick baits underneath some feeding spaniards. Beats me why the spaniards left my offering alone, but perhaps the heavy twisted leader may have been visible in the gin clear water. After a protracted battle of 20min, the fish and I were in need of a rest, however, both of us recovered well and the fish powered off strongly after a quick boat side revival. Good result all round.
The land-based action was bloody unbelievable, with lots of fired-up fish hitting lures repeatedly until the hooks actually found their mark, and often the lure was only a rod length away from the rocks by the time the hookups occurred. Seeing charged up GT's with mouths agape actually inhale your lure at such close quarters is something you don't quickly forget! The sound of the hit, the jolt of the line snapping tight, and the shuddering scream of the drag all add up to highly addictive fishing!
What was also interesting was that we found the GTs at the same rock shelf for about 4 afternoons in a row leading up to the full moon, this was despite there not being any significant bait holding structure in the location. However, there was a bit of a 'wind eddie' where the Northerly wrapped around the island we we staying on. I can only assume the fish wanted to escape the wind as much as we did?!
We were plagued by strong and persistent Northerly winds, which confined us to our land based pursuits for large chunks of time, but this in turn taught us some valuable lessons about how to approach the fishing.
My brother Ric became known as the mountain goat, due to his sure-footed efforts in landing fish for others, he would hop from rock to rock in hellish oyster-encrusted country, with the leader in hand to extract solid fish from the water. Top work, and many of our fish would have been lost without his brilliant efforts.
Cheers
Angus
