Well I got out with porter the other day. The cyclone had just finished going past and there was a small window of possibly fishable weather before it blew up again.
We had a tough slog out. Swell was between 2-3 meters and there was a fair bit of chop on top. We finally got out to the banks after about an hour and a half as I could only handle about 18 knots running into it. Time for a bigger boat…
It was tough trolling north up the banks because nothing wanted to swim well and we were running into a head sea. A lot of the swell was well over my head when I was standing up. When we tried to zig zag in the trough the spread would get blown all to one side. Bites were slow and hard to come by. We picked up a Spaniard around 8 am and had two missed strikes on the shotgun of which one was a marlin and one was a mystery. We trolled north up to the hards, turned east out to around 300m of water, back south (trolling with the seas was more comfortable but the speed is sporadic because you slow down climbing waves and speed up surfing down them) and then turned in toward the banks. Just wide of the banks we trolled over some bait and a mark 30m down that looked like a billfish. It took him about 25 seconds to hit something but the shotgun fired and porter managed a little black around 50kg. We then continued in toward shore without another strike. Just inside the banks we pulled the gear and headed home.
We marked bait everywhere but saw a lot wide of the hards. Nothing was balled up though, it all looked pretty happy. We did mark a lot more down 100+m and saw some billfish amongst them but nothing was swimming up to eat from our buffet. Couldn’t find anything within 30-50m of surface that we could pull a fish off.
I got my tow camera the next day so hopefully that idea works and we can see what’s in the spread moving forward.
And the little Spaniard.
Wind needs to settle down. The season is over a third done and we’ve managed two trips out and two fish. It was rough but a bit of a bonus trip, I’m supposed to be at work but got sick shortly before I went back so took a week of sickies off.