Hi Guys,
Just come back from a couple of weeks with a bunch of family and mates up around the Smith group of Islands in the Whitsunday area. The weather we encountered was absolutely horrendous for all but 2 days, and really thwarted our efforts to put in serious time on the GTs.
As usual, I took a range of my own poppers and stickbaits up with me, and the lure I thought would work the best was monstered by an elephant-class GT just 2 bloops into it's first cast of the trip. Consequently, the lure and fish were lost in the space of 2 seconds after the beast dived into the coral and bricked me on 130 pound tuffline spooled on a Stella running about 15kg of drag. The old GT special rod was in a world of pain, along with it's operator. Savage stuff.
We did manage to attract the odd trout and GT on poppers, but there was a distinct lack of tidal run for large parts of the trip, which I think might have shut the fish down a bit too. As usual, it's easy to come up with reasons why you are not catching fish....we had plenty of practice at that! Even when we adopted old school methods for reef dwellers and spaniards (such as live baiting), the bites were still generally very slow, so it was a struggle all round.
Anyway, the best fish of the trip was caught land-based and released by my brother late one afternoon. This 25+ kg GT ate a Nomad Cubera 125 and took about 20 minutes on puny 50 pound tackle, which I thought was a very creditable effort, particularly considering the hellish country that needed to be negotiated, and that it ended up being landed in the dark!
Personally, my only landed GT was a solid 15-20 kg fish which ate a home made popper, which I'd loosely based on Crusty's Fullscale Kong. Thanks for that Chris, in this case I want you to know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Anyway, good to get away for a bit and chill with family members and friends.
Cheers
Angus
