Last week I saw a bait ball right off the beach. Didn’t see any predatory fish but the birds were enjoying themselves. Of course I didn’t have my cast net with me.
Then a three days ago I took the youngest two out to find out where we can catch live bait out front here. I’ve messed around with it a little bit but never cracked the code. By some stroke of luck we stumble into a place and were soon catching yakkas. We only had to travel about 500m from the boat ramp and it’s directly in line with where we usually fish out wide so if they’re consistently there we will have some live bait in the future.
We put sixty of these in the freezer for future trips
Yesterday porter and I decided to head wide for another try at a deep drop. After loading up the boat with big rocks we shot out to the yakka hole to see if we could catch some. I brought some burly and we smashed them. We put 30-35 of them in the bait tank within 5-10 minutes before dawn and took off to the banks thinking we could catch some decent fish with our livies.
We hit the banks and messed around in a half a doz places for over 2.5 hours with only one bite. We tried live bait, pilchards and squid and struck out so we have some work to do finding ground out there. We then decided we could catch nothing trolling so we took off toward the ledge out wide.
We had the spread in and I passed a couple marks that looked like billfish
I cut a couple laps and saw a streak of something on the sounder. Looked like big baitfish and they were heading for surface from about 50m but it was just starting to show on the sounder. I mentioned it to porter and he was poking his head over for a look when clickers started howling. Three went down, all skipping yakkas on circle hooks. Two got dropped immediately, porters rod seemed like a winner. He set the drag and it went loose. He freespooled it back and it got picked up again and he managed to hook up. In hindsight I should of been firing a live yakka into the water but regardless he brought us something we actually wanted.
We did circles of the area looking for the school and I rigged two rods up with live yakkas to fire out when we had a strike. Couldn’t find them again. Looked for about an hour and marked one more marlin but nothing wanted to play. We then continued south with the intention of deep dropping.
We got to the place we wanted after finding a ton of dolphins but no sport fish. There appeared to be a bit of show indicating bait/squid/plankton down on the bottom so expectations were high.
The current was to strong for what we were trying to do. We were drifting between 1.6 and 2.4 knots but we got to bottom twice and had the bait pinched before we could get off bottom. Third drop I put a J hook in the squids head and the circle brindled off the top of the mantle. We hit bottom and tried to get up 50m and had a strike immediately. We also hooked up so we started cranking him to surface. I was expecting something cool that would choose to live in 1000’ of water. Lol, imagine my disappointment
A gummy shark. I’ve caught those things in 10m of water before, didn’t need to fish in 300+ for the privilege. Funny part was I unhooked him and he took off again. No barotrauma on that fella.
We spent the afternoon out there not catching anything else but possibly learning a bit. We then ran the 30+ miles home to some sashimi
