The plan

Tim and I belong to a hunting-fishing-shooting-catching forum that has a very relaxed annual fishing competition – we fished the inaugural tourney last year and had a blast. Tim entered us in this year’s comp and it rolled around pretty fast. I was looking at some bathymetric charts the other day and decided on an outcrop that just had to hold fish as the place we’d hit up. The plan was to arrive as early as possible, pump burley back into the reef and fish big baits back into the system. On Friday I went down to Top Catch and loaded up on pilchards, free flow squid, salmon burley and salt ice. That all went into the new 56L Icey-Tek bin that’s now doubling as a seat in the front of The Booger. Put 2 full tanks in (just in case we needed to go and chase work ups), a couple of spare batteries and then loaded the car with all the usual stuff.

Tim arrived 15 minutes late - having been at a wedding on Friday and not getting home until late he probably only had a few hour’s sleep – and we set off for Gulf Harbour. We arrived and Tim went looking for the organiser Chris, who was found asleep in his truck, then we launched and set off. The weather wasn’t perfect – a 15kt SW made our 18km trip pretty wet, but I was encased in my light weight chest waders and raincoat so stayed pretty dry underneath. Having said that we made decent time averaging about 19 knots. We sounded the first reef system which appeared dead, before heading over to our intended spot. It just felt ‘fishy’ – overcast, with thousands of terns and sheer waters sharing the location. We set burley on the anchor chain and from the back of the boat and deployed our first baits. The water column under the boat was filled with bait sign. Tim got hit straight off and landed a nice pannie which would turn out to be our largest for the day. We fished solidly for several hours, taking a steady stream of not overly large but really fat high quality snapper. Gannets dived around us randomly and at times the shearwaters got up in mass and moved over to where terns worked bait schools. We chased one workup, but with no mammals around to push the bait up the workup was sporadic. What looked like the slashes of fast moving kahawai showed on the sounder screen but the bottom was devoid of snapper sign. We moved back into the reef system and set for the tide change, and whilst the fish were off the boil we had a hit every few minutes from undersized fish – we probably released 30 odd under or just over the legal size of 27cm. The wind was incessant so we decided to move into the lee of Otata Island with another dozen or so boats. What a difference, the sea was flat and it was warm out of the wind. But the fishing was pretty slack with only very small fish taking the baits. Around then I lost the burley over the side as the knot holding it worked loose – bugger. We fished on for a while before deciding to head off early to give us time to get back to the ramp in time for the weigh in. We thought that Tim’s first fish would be a contender for a prize, but it proved to be an ounce outside the top 3 fish. We hung around for a few drinks and a barbecue, then headed home. With a good bin of iced down fish we were pretty happy with what was an excellent day.

Our little tub alongside a competitor craft... yup, we beat it

Aftermatch function

Next year, I have a plan……