Some cracking fish with one being reported over 200kg. Plenty of pics on Facebook.
Yesterday I believe 5 were landed in town. I went with a mate for our first go at it yesterday.
The area is one that I know well from my commercial trawl days in the 70-80s. I felt a little daunted going out there in a 21ft Shark Cat. The closest grounds are at the head of the Bass Canyon , this is 47nm straight out from shore. Roughly South East of Lakes. There are very steep underwater cliffs in this area. Some drop 1km in a very short distance. Seems the best swordy fishing is close to these cliffs. We gave it a go in 500mtrs. Quite some depth to bottom fish... Rigged with tied on whole squid and a sacrificial weight of 2kg. This was tied on to the hook with 15lb mono so it would break away. Worked well except for one drop when it fouled the leader. It was a lot of work to get that mess back up...
Well about 2hrs in we had one line start to slowly pay out, seem like an enquiry. Bit hard to strike on a 500mtr line but the guy on the rod did his best. We weren't sure at this stage whether we were fouled on the bottom or had fouled the weight again, but sure had some pressure on the line.
Much winding and sweating later, about 30 minutes later, the fish/slash weight did a run and confirmed that it was a fish. By this time about 200mtrs of line was back on the reel. Another 20 sweaty minutes by the guy on the reel and he had just a hundred meters to go. It had another run, then more progress. Woohoo got the gaff ready.... Then BANG and a slack line.
A few words like Oh dear I think we lost it... :oops: :oops: :oops: Wound in the line and busted off with some very scuffed line just at the start of the leader... What it was we will never know.... That's fishing..For those that are thinking of going out for a go. Please be well prepared and know your weather. This is big boat country with nowhere to hide if the weather comes up. You need to be able to carry a lot of fuel. We used 400lt for the day. It is out of mobile phone range and very difficult to call to a shore base on VHF. Coming home we lost a motor , still not sure of why. Just suddenly stopped and would wind over but not even fire. Lucky being a twin motor setup we came back on one motor at 18knts..
Don't ask me how to catch them or what rods etc. I am the new chum at this.
There has also been a few Tuna caught out there. We saw a massive bait ball being beaten up by Dolphins and false killer whales??? not sure of the i.d. but looked like the pictures. We had our deep drop gear down at the time and by the time we wound it up and put some Tuna rigs on we had lost the patch.
