Headed north of Magnetic Island yesterday to have a fish with an old mate of mine who was in town for a couple of days. The forecast was for a 6-8 knot south westerly swinging to a south easterly later in the afternoon - pleased to report that the forecast was spot on and we could not have asked for better conditions.
Our first stop was some small shoals and isolate patches just wide of Magnetic Island. Expecting to find good schools of bait fish and plenty of spanish mackerel, we dropped our 45g Bumpa Bar lures to the bottom. Surprisingly there was hardly any bait schools showing, but there were a few large fish showing in the bottom soft corals. We worked the lures using a jig/twitch technique over a number of these micro shoals all within a few miles of each other and were well rewarded with a mixed bag of quality red emperor and nannygai. We also landed a few triggerfish, trevally and got smoked by a huge cobia around 30kg - better take some heavy gear next time!
Wanting to find some larger bait schools that were more likely to hold better numbers of pelagics we headed wider to Shark Shoal. We found the bait and the spaniards ..... and the sharks! We landed only one 10kg spaniard out of about 15 hook-ups. They were sitting right on the bottom under the bait school and whenever we hooked up, they would scream there way up through the bait school and get smashed by a shark. There were some big spaniards among them and the blistering runs were awesome. I also spent an hour fighting some moster of the deep that was so big that the sharks didn't even bother it. I was well and truly undergunned and unable to get this beast anymore than 40ft off the bottom - think it was a very big cod or groper, but will never know because I busted him off when I realised that this was a battle I was not going to win anytime soon (OK - I am getting old and my back was aching and my arms were about to fall off!)
Anyway, a great day fishing with an old mate - doesn't get much better. I will try again next week and hopefully the spaniards will be feeding on top!
