Geelong outer harbor report

[fitzy90]

Not many reports that I could see for the outer harbor , so I’ll start one and update where I can
Went out over the weekend to the outer harbor to try our luck, we are still debating whether it was late Saturday night, or super early Sunday morning, either way we launched at 1.00 am. Launching at Avalon we whipped across to Clifton springs to try jig up some fresh bait however this was a waste as an hour of jigging passed and not a touch, lucky we had some reserve bait from the last session. Headed over to our gummy spot, burley hard and sit and wait for the change of tide. 30 mins or so into the session the first rod went off and landed a nice size gummy, missed another good hit. a few mins later had the rod scream off like a banshee, had a good 10 minute fight until it discovered the anchor rope and that was the end of that. After that we caught a few banjos after that but not a lot of action, just goes to show how important it is fishing the right tides for gummies.
Sun up, move to the whiting. Had a short sharp session on the whiting, ended up with a dozen or so fishing off bird rock, squid and tube worm did the damage, hard fishing through the 40 or so pinkies we threw back.
All in all a good session and a nice feed.

[bowl]

Good see a report from outer.It hard to navigate pastshallows/rocks when launching from avalon at night

[fitzy90]

I would not recommend it if you don't know the area well, i've been fishing there for years and can still get a bit disorientated navigating around bird rock.

[bowl]

K been itching to launch during day instead of st helens,ill wait till. i get proper gps with maps. ect

[fitzy90]

I thought i will keep my geelong reports in the one place

After bailing on the Saturday morning plan due to the wind we decided to go out to catch the last two hours of the outgoing tide on Sunday morning, unfortunately this meant being at the ramp at 1am, at least we the choice of car parks!
got to our gummy spot and got the burley trail going. it only took 20 mins and we had our first gummy on the boat which was a great start. Over the next 2 hours we caught 4 gummys, and missed a lot more hits than that, im not sure about every one else but i will never be using circle hooks for the gummys again as we missed a lot more fish than we hooked. After the tide change we had one more run but in general it was quiet after that. Salmon fillets and squid did the damage in the bait department having caught these during the week.
Just before sun up we moved to our squid spot, we had a mate on board who has never caught a squid so the first 5 minutes was explaining how to jig, pause and lift. First cast he threw out, 2 jigs later we heard him mumble " Everywhere i go i get bloody snagged" this followed up by "**** its pulling back", a few minutes later his first squid was on the boat, which happened to be the biggest for the day. Small natural green jigs over the weed beds with slow lifting jigging did the trick this time.
Best time of year to be fishing geelong, and just because everyone else is fishing for whiting does not mean there are not other species available!

[GTSHoon]

Nice work mate, what sizes on the gummies?
Cam

[fitzy90]

55cm and 52cm partial length, the ones we let go around the same size, haven't had much luck on the bigger ones this year

[GTSHoon]

Pretty good size, I'm still yet to even catch one
Cam

[midis]

Nice catch there!
I'm not a fan of the circle hooks either. I find I lose more fish with them.

[vikodin]

Great to read about some outer harbour action, its not one of the places I go to target gummies but are sometimes by catch there.
As far as circles for gummies I wouldn't use anything else, It's so rare I miss or drop a fish with them.
If your losing fish something is wrong, could be one of many things too.