Had my second charter yesterday and while I only landed 1 fish there was a lot more action than the last charter! About 5 mins after leaving the dock, we saw a mother and baby whale basking in the warm shallow water. My first time seeing a whale in the wild.. Then another few minutes further we came across a huge school of larger bait fish eating small bait fish.. The school would have been as big as a footy oval with fish jumping everywhere, we hooked up to one of the larger ones but it was eaten by a shark nearly straight away.. Next we trolled out to a FAD (got a pic of this one for you Jim lol) and hooked up to a wahoo of around 8kg but it got off after a few seconds.. We then trolled towards a sea mount, which rises from 700m to 200m, to try for a marlin.. There wasn't any marlin but we saw birds working so we went to have a look and stumbled across the first school of Yellow Fin for the season.. These things were huge, around 50kg, and while we didn't hook any it was still amazing to see such big fish jumping 2 meters out of the water only 30-50 meters from the boat!.. After we couldn't catch any we went back inshore to throw poppers around the reefs.. I had hook ups from a red bass and a blue fin trevally but both somehow managed to throw the hooks.. I did manage to catch a black and yellow reef fish though! Skipper didn't even know what it was called haha.. We saw another school of YFT only about 100- 150m from shore so we quickly got to them and first cast with my popper I hooked up to a 3kg fish but it too threw the hooks, next cast bang! On again, this time a 6-7kg.. Man did this thing pull like a freight train!.. Can't imagine what a 50kg one would be like!.. After fighting it for a minute or so, mr bronze whaler decides he wants in on the action. So that's another fish lost
.. The tuna disappeared after that only to resurface around 500m away but we were running out of time and seemed to hard to catch on artificial lures so we headed back inside the islands to another reef, no more fish but did see a big manta ray which circled the boat a couple of times!.. Anyways I'm gunna have another LB fish this afternoon, I'll put up a report if I get anything worth mentioning :thumbsup:
This is one of the many different looking FAD's
The only fish landed for the day
Tuna busting up the surface
Me fighting the tuna
Just as the tuna got eaten, if you look closely you can see my braid loosely drifting in the water lol
The manta ray
Great report as well!