Christmas Island in the Republic of Kiribati has been high on my list of places to visit for several years now. Primarily this is for its repuation as one of the best bonefish destinations on the planet, but also for the potential as a popping and jigging location. Christmas Island is a dot in the ocean that sits between Fiji and Hawaii and is notable for being one of the largest coral atolls in the world. The actual landmass is relatively small, but the network of shallow sandflats contained in the lagoon is pretty vast.
Myself and eight keen fishos descended on the island keen to sample the variety of fishing on offer. Our group was split down the middle between guys primarily interested in flyfishing and those more keen on the bluewater prospects. I chose to keep a foot in both camps, giving the 6wt a flogging early in the week and switching to popping and jigging tackle after satisfying my bonefishing itch.
The popper fishing started at a moderate pace with the normally productive GT spots close to home not producing great numbers of fish. This was put down to the presence of a tuna fleet being in port to re-supply - all the GT's were sitting under the ships sucking down scraps rather than being interested in chasing poppers. The jigging and soft plastics fishing on the other hand was pretty awesome - if you could land anything!! the guys went through nearly every soft plastic and jighead they could lay their hands on in the first few days, providing great entertainment for anyone watching the carnage. Coronation trout, Gt's, red bass, green jobfish, black trevally and rosy jobfish made up the bulk of the catches but a selection of other fish such as highfin amberjack, bar cod and unidentifyables added to the tally. Most of the jigging was done in 40-50m shallows that rapidly dropped off into 80-150m and beyond over a very short distance. Most of the spots had an offshore breeze so you would begin dropping in the shallows and work your way out deeper as the drift went on. At the start of the drift, trout and bass would be hooked, quickly descending into black trevally and jobfish followed by AJ's, and if you continued to drop (and didn't run out of line) bar cod were encountered. One thing that was truly amazing was that the guides used no GPS or sounder to find the jigging spots. our hand held GPS that we brought with us indicated that the guides and boat driver could locate the same spots to within metres each day. The mind boggles to think what they could find with a half decent sounder/gps unit!
The descision was made to make some longer runs to the southern side of the island to see if more GT's could be located. An early start the following morning preceeded a long run to the far southern end of the island. The first spot we stopped at produced a dozen or more GT's plus other species on jigs and poppers in the first hour or so. We thought this was a pretty awesome start to the day until the guide, English suggested that we move to the 'GT Spot'.
'What, theres a better spot?' was our reply.
'just around that point' says English gesturing to the next headland.
A few hours and 40 odd GTs later, when we are stiff and sore from continual double, triple, and quadrouple hookups, we begin to understand what he means by a good GT spot. Apparently the next headland is better again, but we didn't have the energy to fight another fish...
Anyway I'll finish the report here otherwise there will be nothing left for the tight line mag article. I'm sure some of the other guys will be keen to post a few pics as well.
Keep an eye out for the You Tube videos - we have 20-30 hours of GoPro footage to edit of Popping jigging and fly fishing from the week.
Cheers
Duncan
