Many of you would already be familiar with the results of Marion Reef 2008 because you were there! For the rest of you, well, I wasn't sure I could post this in a forum titled "GT Popping Reports & Expeditions" because we saw and caught so few GTs!
I think it would be fair to say that the fishing at Marion was pretty shut down for our week and for the week prior to ours (The Fishhead group). I'm not quite sure of why that was the case. The tides were excellent and the conditions were okay but there were simply no GTs around in the shallows.
In addition, the doggies were not willing to come out and play. Certainly, there were a few of them around and the guys encountered a number of these including the usual unstoppables you hook when jigging but noone managed to land a big doggie. A few of the guys did encounter some decent fish including on the surface but ended up only donating their stickbaits.
I decided early in the week to stop butting my head against the wall and simply focus on what was available so I spent a few days chasing big coral trout. I didn't manage to hook up on any real dinosaurs but I had by chances. I managed to entice two absolute monsters out after the stickbait but they failed to hook up. At the end of it, I had a rather enjoyable week having caught a heap of reefies on stickbaits. That said, I can't remember what catching a GT is like any more.
The guys very kindly donated a stack of lures to the fish at Marion. I think it would be hard to go past the number of lures donated by Chris Tan or Malcolm Crane although Rob Ciotucha tried hard! Chris found the doggies and sharks had a particular liking for the very blingy Sevenseas Hooker jigs, Malcolm donated a stack of beautiful little Japanese stickbaits, seabass lures and takiburas to the resident reefies and Rob, well, Rob donated just about everything ranging from Orion stickbaits to Sevenseas Hooker jigs to his entire collection of little stickbaits. I also have to admit that Rob kept Malcolm and myself very entertained every time he got smoked - which was often!
There were two decent GTs landed during the week. Both Josh Shardlow and John Campbell landed very nice fish. Josh's fish was over the 30kg mark and John's was a monster. I'm not going to hazard a guess at the weight but it was BIG. GTs were just so few and far between which was unbelievable as some of the spots we fished looked like they had to have GTs in the location.
Greg Burt landed the biggest fish of the week being an enormous cod of some kind. I would have picked it for a purple cod except for one small problem - it wasn't purple in colour! In any event, it was an absolute beast of a thing.
Boy, were there some sharks around! A considerable number of reefies and doggies got sharked which was very frustrating.
I caught one really weird-arse fish. I don't need to tell you which picture it is because you'll pick it. Anyone know what it is?
I also can't finish this report without a mention of the infamous Team Deviant. Cam Foley and Dan Baxter were the two members of Team Deviant. Methinks I should say no more although by the end of the week, we were starting to suspect that Josh who had kept very quiet may have been the captain of the team. They certainly excelled themselves on the last night at Hamilton island!
Anyway, notwithstanding the fishing being a bit slow, the boys all had a very enjoyable time.
Onto Bugatti 2009!
