Hi All,
Seeing as not too many reports coming thought it best to kick something off.
I've just come back from a 9 day charter to the remote Wreck reef system in the coral sea, around 450km off the Queensland coast.
The charter company currently running out to this location and other nearby reefs like Cato and Frederick is Big Cat Reality.
These guys run a slick budget operation out of a large cat that carry's 6 tenders and can load one larger private tender if your keen to bring you trailer boat along.
To get there it’s a 34 odd hour steam from Bundaberg and on our trip it was a lumpy journey. I didn't fair too well along with some of the other fishos but once we arrived and tucked in behind Porpoise cay all was good. Wind for the 6 days out there varied from 5 to 20 knots with days around 10knots
We had 13 anglers on board and that meant 2 per tender and 3 in their own plate boat.
What makes this charter attractive is the price as you're not paying for guides. While the tenders are small and sometimes a challenge out the front of the reefs with large swells they perform quite well. The Cat has bunk beds, 3 toilets and 3 showers which is plenty. Food was great with a top class chef on-board.
These remote reefs are only visited a few times a year so are considered pristine and they certainly hold lots of monster fish.
For this trip I had a few friends join and the remainder were mostly young guys keen to nail some big GT's, dogs, YFT, Coral trout and more.
Day 1 and 2
Porpoise cay and nearby reefs
We launched the tenders by 6am and all headed in different directions in search of likely ground.
It wasn't long and reports of Doggies, coral trout and Jobfish started flowing, for my tender we focused on casting poppers and stickbaits to the reef edges and found some monster trout but wouldn’t commit. After some lunch back at the vessel we had a change of plan to jig the deeper channels between the reefs and paid off straight up with Amberjack, Coral trout, red bass and some solid GT's in 45m that were around the 25-30kg mark.
Day 2 was similar with quality jigging to be had and we scored much the same. We also worked the surface for a while for some more GT's but no monsters.
Day 3 and 4
Bird Island
Crews were all doing well with many focusing on the local dogtooth, a few quality fish were landed but many sharked.
The guys in the plate boat pushed out to the front of the reef in the large swell and found YFT feeding strongly.
With this news we headed out to join and found the tuna backing off but wahoo, dogtooth and some large GT's about.
I was bricked many times losing stickbaits and many jigs when we found a patch of monster dogtooth, one memorable bricking happened after losing some large unstoppable units. I decided to really crank up the Stella 20k matched with a Synit AA dogtooth and try and put some pain on these big dogs. I think this just made them more determined and next one pulled 150m of PE8 in 30secs before finding the bottom. I struggled to stay in the boat and hang on. I believe we could have beaten some but couldn't get out into the deeper quick enough with the big swell. Needless to say the Synit AA didn’t handle the over abuse and snapped on the next monster.
For me the highlight of Bird is the huge drop offs straight of the reef edges that hold monster dogs, plenty of wahoo and big GT's. The biggest GT landed for the day was caught by a mate and was around 40kg.
I did manage a few very large Coral trout casting to the reef edge and largest went 103cm.
Day 5 and 6
West Islet
The final day and we had some great topwater action.
The YFT were thick and two 50kg YFT were caught by anglers casting stickbaits to the feeding schools.
I managed to lose around 12 tuna, I had real trouble getting the hooks to stick. I raised and had a few on my West Coast Poppers but they were quick to throw the hooks.
Later in the day we found some whopping Jobfish on poppers close to 20kg, a few GT’s and a good patch of dogtooth with a quick but crazy bite that lasted for around half hour.
I even had a large blue marlin pop up next to the boat for a look and the guys that did troll small skirts for a while found sailfish.
While these reef systems Cato, Wreck, Frederick are in the middle of the coral sea they are relatively close to each other, about 80-100km apart. The fishing varies quite a bit from one to the other with Cato being the pick for GT’s and Wreck for Dogtooth.
Somewhere I’ll visit again for sure.
Rods:
For Popping: Ripple Fisher PF, Carpenter MH, FCL, Custom UC sidewinders and more.
For jigging: we used Synit, Saltiga, Temple reef and others
Reels were mostly Stella’s in 18k and 20k
Line PE8-12 Varivas solid and jigging braid
Poppers: WCP Montebello, FEED pins, Reefsedge
Stickbaits: FCL CSPS in 220 and 230 EXT, ASWB SS120’s, Orions.
Cheers
Jason
www.ntwt.com.au Here are just a few of the fish caught by myself and others on the charter
