Here is a wrap-up of the last trip....
Where, Zipolo Habu Resort in the Solomon Islands.
To get there, the
cheapest route was via Brisbane to Honiara on Pacific Blue(Virgin), it
required an overnight stay in Honiara (We stayed at the King Solomon
Hotel, but others like the Royal Mendana are just as good ) to catch the
next mornings internal flight to Munda in the Western Province, on New
Georgia Island. Internal and international return tickets , with
insurance, cost around $1,900.
NZ aid dollars are at work here,
rebuilding the Munda airport to international jet standard, the hope is
that in a year or two you may be able to fly direct from Aus straight to
Munda, cutting out the expensive and time-wasting stay in Honiara,
which frankly is one of the arm-pits of the world. It would certainly
save a day of your trip.
Once at the resort (after being picked up at
the airport and escorted to the near-by jetty and zapping out to the
resort by boat), I stayed at my own bungalow (built for me about 5 years
ago), which is the smaller of the 2 deluxe bungalows if you want to
check out the Zipolo Habu Website (www.zipolohabu.com.sb I think). This
has 2 double beds, and a single, the main master Bdrm has the huge
kingsize bed and a spare single bed (if you need to have kids handy I
guess), the smaller room also has a double bed. Both doubles have mozzie
nets over a frame, with ceiling fans blowing straight down onto the
bed, a HUGE relief in the muggy Solomons nights!
The view from the balcony truly is a Million Dollar View....
looking out over the Vonavona lagoon toward Mt Kolombangara.
Dawn
to dusk, the view is always spectacular, with fish constantly working
and moving thru the shallows in front of you, dug-out canoes of the
locals paddling or sailing past at dawn and dusk.... just a total bliss
out sort of scene...
sunset from my balcony
(damn it is so nice loading these pics at broadband speeds!)
The
resort has a restaurant and bar, you can buy meal packages if you want,
or just order your meals as you go, which is what I do as once you
acclimatise, you find your need for food drops markedly in the heat.
Trust me on this, eating is one of my speciality subjects!
The meals
are heavily fish based, being an island resort, not surprising really,
with crayfish, mudcrab and fish meals the mainstay of the menus,
although there is always a meat option for carnivores like myself who do
not fancy fish.
The maindrink is SolBrew, I am told this is a good
beer, and it is reasonably priced too. They have a over-strength beer as
well, SB, with a higher alch for thems as wants a faster buzz I guess.
Perhaps someone else can rate the beer?
For lunches, you gotta have the Soltai Tuna toasted sandwiches. Yum.
Fishing options.
This
is why i come here, there is just so much you can do fishing wise.
There is always somewhere to go, somethnig to do. If it happens to be a
bit blowy, you have the option of heading into the mangroves or up the
rivers for mangrove jack fishing etc, which for Kiwis is an exotic
lark...
The
Bairoko river. The dead trees are a result of the big earthquake up
here 6 years ago, when the land dropped a metre or so, and the trees got
flooded out. Makes for perfect habitat for the Mangrove jacks though,
numbers are high, and Jacks are NOT shy about having a slash at your
lures!
...
however, there are more fish up here than just the jacks, there are all
sorts of jungle perch and other inter-tidal and fresh water fish, up to
the spot-tail bass in the upper waters of the larger rivers, these get
BIG, like over 10kg, and are well worth targeting. A lot of the fish are
smaller though, so a 6-10lb spin set is all you really need. Be
prepared to lose lures though :-)
seki-seki,
or archer fish, will attack en masse anything that touches the water.
Their mini-frenzies as they attack lures often brings good jacks up to
see what is a-foot (sorry, a-fin).
Small lures are mugged by brassy and small GTs in the rivers as well,
and also other species like these two speciesus anonymouses...
On light gear, it is a bit of fun, and you never know when a decent fish is going to come charging in....
On
the nice days, if you do not want to spend all your time in the boats,
you can kayak or wade the sand flats around the resort....
... the sand flats just a couple of hundred metres from the resort. Miles and miles of them.
One
of the main (hell, the main reson I guess) reasons I head back to Lola
Island (Zipolo's island, from now on, I will refer to the resort as
"lola" as it is faster than Zipolo Habu resort) is the popper and lure
fishing.
All around the vonavona lagoon, one of the worlds largest,
you have a huge range of reefs. From the open-ocean coastline of Parara
Island (Hilton Heads area)
.
to the sheltered reef lines along the Blackett Straits, there is just a
huge range of popper and lure fishing opportunities, and always,
always, somewhere calm to chuck your lures.
Hotspot on the Blacketts....
The
main target is of course the Giant Trevally. The standard size for
these fish up here isnot huge, most will be in the 10-15lb range, many
being nice 20lb fish, but I have got fish up to 60lb here... serious
fish at that size.
A nice, standard sized GT.
I
have found that hese are easily targetted using good 30lb fireline
sets, 50lb if you are really paranoid about losing gear, but 30lb gives
you pretty much all the horsepower you will really need.
This last
trip I was using pretty much all the time my 20lb set, a rod made for me
by the guys at Kilwell on one of their PE3 nano-blanks (just PM Nagged
for the details), and man, what a sweet rod/set that was, teamed with a
Penn Conquer 5000. My heavier set, which I used in places like the munda
bar, hotspot or double Island usually, as these are tiger-country areas
when fish can get much larger, is a Van Staal popper rod with a Quantum
Boca 80 reel. Good reliable set-up, solid as, and not a budget-breaker
either.
Aside from the poppering, I really enjoy the bottom fishing
up here, as you truly never know what the blazes is coming up next. In
NZ, fishing in 200m (as you do here), you are going to get, well, Puka,
maybe gemfish, a bluenose or a golden snapper, that is about it on a
regular basis. Up in the solomons, multiply that list by ten... you
never know what the heck is down there. Small things pop up among decent
fish....
... like these litlle colourful fellas, up to the very prized snappers and larger jobfish...
longtail snapper,
rusty or smalltooth jobfish, and hopefully the very common gold-lined jobfish....
which is a damn fine eating fish, and that is saying somethnig coming from someone who doesn't like fish that much!
I
guess most folks heading up there for the first time will be much more
intent of "Big Game" type stuff though, yellowfin, marlin, sailfish,
that sort of bluewater stuff.
Well, they have that too, with several
FADs within an hour or so of the resort, this trip we certainly had
marlin in our lures at the fads, and we saw sailfish everywhere as well
(read my earlier post about the sailfish being herded and eaten by the
False Killer Whales)
... oh, and yes, that IS normal sea-state up there.
On
our best day,we got a pile of small mahimahi, skippies and small yfin,
and as we were using light spin-sets, it was a huge ball, flicking
little lures around or towing small 3in skirts around the fad,
constantly hooking, losing and landing all sorts of fish....
.... rainbow runners and mahimahi....
...as you can see, it was just plain fun.
So,
there you go, as you can see, you have a huge range of options up here.
Everywhere you look at sea you will find schools of tunas, mostly
skippies, and the reefs and lagoons are just glorious in their clarity
and their profusion of fishlife.
These days i like to take a few
different lures or toys up with me to try out. I go for 3 week spans, so
have plenty of time to give stuff a pretty good crack. This trip I had
with me as my "projects" my new Kilwell PE3 rod set, I had several River
to Sea (R2C) lures that I wanted to use on the new rod, which I had
built specifically to use such lures), and a range of Sebile and Berkley
lures from Purefishing.
Firstly, I had a bunch of little wee
lures from Berkley, sub-dogs and... others, I have forgotten their
names. Both little stickbaits, bibless lures and small bibbed minnows. I
had these matched to a 6lb berkley nanofil line/1000 Abu Soron reel
set, and man, they were a pile of fun.
The first one I used was... I
think... called a scum dog or something (I left all the packaging at
home to save weight, so am a little shakey on the names now), a little
floating surface/twitch bait lure. On the flats, this lure was just
deadly, working on the top or at most an inch or so below the surface,
it managed to stay out of the sea-grass, but was close enough to nail a
succession of small fish like the os'sanga (sweetlips n roviana
language) and trevallies...
.. this is a sub-dog, not the surface scum-dog, lure, with an os'sanga. Sorry it is in B/W. Flamin' camera, grrrr...
...
but I also had a ball, in the slightly deeper, less grassy, areas with
the sub-dogs, as these slightly heavier lure cast about 10m further than
the scumdogs. I also had a small popper from the range, which was a hit
with trevallies on the shallows....
...
and the small bibbed minnows were also deadly flicking around mangrove and reefy areas...
...
only trouble is that the 2 or 3 examples I had did not last long enough
for more pictures :-) It is a hard and short life for light tackle
lures in the tropics!
... headin' fer the coral!
I
also was very keen to try the sebile lures I had with me, this time in
sufficient numbers to be able to use them properly. By far the most
effective Sebile I used this trip (as a surface/casting lure) was the
small Stick Shadd. These just recently arrived in NZ, I had 2 with me,
and after re-rigging them with decent salt water, solid hooks, (size 1
or 2 owner 4x strongs), they proved to be deadly as a faster retrieve
lure for all sorts of fish....
... again, all on my sweet 20lb Kilwell set-up.
I got fish on the otehr sebiles, the splasher(popper) and bongo-jerks etc...
...
but
the small stick shadd was for me the stand-out in this range, and one I
think will be a superb general lure here in NZ too, for kings, kahawai
and probably snapper as well.
The next range of lures I had were the R2C lures.
Without
a doubt, for me the small R2C Wideglide was the go-to lure of the trip
when working the reefs. This is because I was using the light set so
much, when I used the heavy gear, my favourite was the R2C Doggie....
...
.... but on the light set? The small Wideglide. I have so many pics of fish on this lure, where do I start?
.
....
...they
are an excellent lure, given they have a very slow action, really just a
twitch-retrieve style that leaves the lure jerking about over the
target areas for much longer than other lures that need a faster
retrieve, such as various poppers etc.
Awesome little lure, just wish they had some sexier colours is all.
Other
R2C lures were also deadly of course, the bubble-pop poppers (not the
biggest version but there 4inch one) was lethal (no, not you Eric) on
all sorts of fish, mainly the trevallies....
... and until I lost it right at the start of the trip, the small R2C Dumbell popper was just a machine...
.
All
up, we had a ball with these smaller lures. They didn't just get small
fish either, oh no. Phyllis was using my light set on the last day, with
that bubble-pop popper, and scored one of the better GTs of the trip on
it. The rod, a Kilwell PE3, made with an extra 6inches added into the
butt to give me extra length for twitching the stick-baits, was really
put to the turps....
, and the fish itself shows why....
... bloody nice fish there Phyllie!
What
else. Oh yes. For the bottom fishing, this time i took up with me a few
300gm Intruder jigs from Jarvis Walker. First I was using them as plain
lures (cheated by adding a small bait onto the hooks though I must
admit), and for dropping 200m, they worked fine...
...
but as time went by, I took the hooks off the lures (after losing a
couple in the bottom), and found that just as plain sinkers they were
very effective, even more so as they are lumo-painted.
Maybe not as
effective as a cyalume, but certainly much more rugged and long-lasting,
I definitely caught far more fish on my rigs than cliff, my mate, who
was using normal sinkers, right beside me. I would say by a factor of at
least 3 to 1. So, that was a discovery right there, take some good lumo
bottom fishing gear, the Intruders do it for me, for sure.
Well, that is about it I guess. If I think of anything else, I can add it later i suppose, but that was basically my trip.
The
weather is at it's most stable and calm in June and October as these
are the times when the trades (only moderate really up here anyhow, not
like further south among the pacific islands) are slowing and shifting
from their SE to SW trends. However, the daily temps are a pretty
standard low-30s, night temps ten degrees less I guess, dropping to a
cool 18deg at around 4 am.
The water temps are around the 30-32deg
mark, going for a swim is just awesome, no groinal cringe as you wade
into the water, the snorkeling is just mind-blowing around the reefs,
there are plenty of old WW2 wrecks to dive on or look at as well, all in
all it is a great holiday spot, at least, I think so.
But really?
It
is not the catching of the fish that is so intoxicating about the
place, it is simply the being of the there.
Try it sometime.