I always love the anticipation of going to a new spot. You're never really quite sure what is going to happen, you get a sense that you could achieve anything. Tying up the arsenal I could actually feel adrenaline kicking in.
Armed with fresh squid, Thursday nights enormous salmon, and a dozen silver whiting we made the trek down to Phillip Island and geared up the walk in. The carpark was freaking freezing, fully exposed to the SW wind and the fading light. The walk in was mellow and not as bad as I thought it might be with the rising tide.
The easy to navigate ledge was tucked away from the swell....a welcome change to not have to pay absolute attention all the time. After a couple of minutes of dicking around, i landed a bait in the water and instantly hooked up....
Blue spotted goatfish. Super Super aggressive, had only been in the water for 60 seconds and the Tcurve was bending nicely. A good sign!
Next cast CarlG lands a nice grass whiting.....definitely onto some fish....now to find something bigger. A couple more grasswhiting. As I rebate and as my sinker hits the bottome BOOM! in comes a 40ish cm flathead.....we're definitely onto a session here.
With all the action I thought i'd try some soft plastics. Rigging up a pumpkinseed turtle back on a 1/4 ounce jighead gave me some distance and also some finesse on my little 3-6 impact nano.
Six bites in a row, Six turtlebacks destroyed.
I tried a little paddle tail with no effect, and some lighter jigheads but couldn't get the range i needed. Back to chilling with my bait rods....
A couple of minutes later I brought in a beautiful KG! Wow, shallow water ledge fishing is going well....
Then Carl's whiting rig doubles over and the drag on his stradic 4k starts screaming......10 minutes later we break off a MASSIVE skate just at the rocks. Bit of excitement. I love watching these things swim and love watching them swim away even more.
We were fishing a sandy channel with a weedbed and bit of reef out a touch further. It looks EXACTLY like the one at hearn road so we tried jigging for squid. Coudln't get the jigs to work properly so MrG whacked out a silver whiting on a float....
WOO! about 22cm hood i think, we didn't bother measuring it. What a session! Love the diversity. The sense that everytime a rod buckles you don't know whats going to be on the end of it makes this kind of fishing absolutely fascinating. We'd now been fishing for about four hours, had caught 10 different species (swell shark, wrasse and a few more not mentioned here) and hightide was still half an hour away!
Then.......
Nothing happened for the next 90 minutes. At 1030 we decided to call it a night, the original plan was to fish for longer but we both have work sunday and it's been a good night. Just as i'm packing up my whiting rod the nitro doubles over......
And in comes a reasonable sized pinkie! It was a keeper. I didn't get apic just of it but i'll measure it for the species comp after I finish writing this report. Probably could have hung around for another hour but it was getting late and we both decided to call it a night.
We landed eleven species in total, with three keepers and one squid used for baits. Great night on a ledge that I would be entirely comfortable fishing through the night as there is literally no swell.
I don't often keep fish to eat, but Tongiht LadyK and I will eat a seafood buffet of KGW, Flathead and Pinkie snapper.....and if dog is lucky he might get some too.
