Took a guy from work out yesterday for one last attempt this season. Being as it’s that time of year again the inshore fish are gone and there should be the odd straggler out on the shelf. I asked smithy and jay and both told me the fish are gone but nobody had been out for over a week due to weather. They thought if anything was around to be caught it would be out on the shelf.
We ran out to the banks and did a couple of laps for some meat. No dice. Even the bait was gone. We then cut east and rolled past the fad where we picked up three tiny mahi. We then kept steaming east until we got out where we hooked those stripes last April. On the way in about 150m of water we found lots of birds and dolphins so we did a few laps but didn’t find any bait and no sport fish so we kept motoring. Eventually we got out where we had some success last April. We marked seven out there between 300-800m but they were all deep and nothing came up to the spread.
When we get that deep I set my range to the top 150m. I don’t care what’s deeper cause even if they’re 100m down they probably aren’t coming up. I’ve pulled them up from 70m before but never any deeper. Usually I want to see them within 30m and I feel confident we will get a strike.
Anyway, we picked up a few more mahi as we trolled around pretending we knew what we were doing.
The biggest was about 9-10 kg but I didn’t get a pic of that one on my phone. Three would of been over 5kg and the rest were little like in the pictures.
We then trolled south about 25-30 miles down off cape Morton to an area called heaven without seeing any other billfish marks, no strikes and nothing interesting to report. All up, eight mahi came home. We lost a few more and we had two other strikes that I don’t know what hit but I don’t think they were marlin and from what was left of my gar I think one was a wahoo or Spaniard.
That draws the billfishing season to a disappointing close. I had a target of 100 tagged this season and I only managed four. We had many trips last year where we caught that many in a single day. I guess it wasn’t my year. Probably best to forget about it and hope it’s better next year.
Now it’s time to reef fish and deep drop to try to find the swords. The deer are also rutting so it’s probably time to go shoot a few.