The spring workups are still happening and the fish are now moving into spawning mode. We are finding tall peaks of snapper 10m high on the bottom as they do their thing. We are also finding the bite harder and when we do catch them they have the love bites and squirt into the boat which is associated with spawning fish activity.
As with every year the bottom end of Waiheke and across to Coromandel and NE of Gannet fills up with bait and the workups go off. The last week has shown some very promising snapper fishing with some of the larger spring males showing up in the 35-40m mark. We are finding the smaller more intense stationary workups way better for these big snapper.
We will fish an area for quite some time, doing long drifts down the exhaust way after the workup has finished. The below 20lber and 18lber were caught about 200-300m away from the epicentre of a workup last week. The 20 was caught on a 100g Orange Slider (Kabura) and the 18lb was caught on a 130g Lime Pickle Jitterbug (Inchiku).
This area is still holding good bait and there has been some great fishing on the western side of the cable zone. Again sometimes there are just a few gannets dive bombing in an area over and over again signifying bait and these areas seem to produce the best snapper and less KY.
When the birds move on we still drift the same line over and over until the snapper stop biting. It’s that old saying “Don’t leave fish to find fish”.
NE of the Ahaas is another area that has been producing some good pannies to fill the bin. There may not be any birds working but if you look around for bait on the sounder and fish the bite times you will catch fish.
We have also found some great workups on our way home from fishing out wide in the late afternoon on the elbow. These workups have helped us to fill the bin after slower days and we even caught skipjacks there a couple of weeks ago (are they early like the spawning snapper)?
See you out there!
Cheers
Capt Nik (Snap)
“Nothing ventured nothing gained”
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