Fishing Reports

Inshore
After a hideous 5 months or so, we have been enjoying good settled weather and slow moving high pressure systems for the last 3 weeks or so.

This has enabled us to get a lot of charter trips done, some  of which have waited patiently for a while.

Snapper are still getting organised into schools to spawn, with their roe in most fish about 50% developed now.

Daytime snapper is always hard at this time of year thru to end of February or March.You have to get out on the sand and find them, or put in the big burley up inshore, on the foul / sand edge. Take your pick of these two styles. This week we have  had better success doing just that.Fishing on the edge was hopeless during the day and we are getting lots of nice pannies out on the sand, but come evening we get into a spot on the reef edge , burley up, and the other nite had great fishing right thru till 11.30 pm.

Try drifting accross from Gt Merc to Opito/Matarangi depending on wind diection, with ledger rigs with mainly very small cut squid baits. Keep your sinker trace very short, so that your bottom ledger dropper is basically right on the bottom, and you will get more snapper and any gurnard you mow over. We caught over 30 snapper in 1.5 hrs doing this on wednesday afternoon. Some times 3 fish at a time per ledger rig coming up .!!!

Deepwater
Kingfish trips to the offshore pins in the last few weeks, have done well on numbers for us, but the average size has been well down with many fish in the 7-9 kilo bracket only.Weak tides did not help this.All the offshore pins still have Kingis, but I hope the size picks up.

Those same weak tides do help our hapuka fishing though, and one Japanese angler got the fish of his dreams, taking a 22 kilo hapuka packed in ice in a poly bin back on the plane to Japan the next morning, and ate it that nite with friends in Japan- now thats fresh !!!

Gamefishing
Its going to happen soon !! I took an angler super wide the other day for a Bluenose or bass chance,  and we came across good coloured water and adequate temperature -over 19 degrees -for yellowfin, by the 300m mark .There is no reason why it wont happen soon,  with a long liner 50 miles north of Cape Runaway last week reporting 40 or more Yellowfin in his catch. 

Do yourself a favour and get a decent thermometer and take it out with a bucket and check that water, adjusting your temp guage in the sounder if you can, dont be the dork on the radio whos got 21-22 degrees already, as I heard of the other day!!!Put your trolling time into water that REALLY is warm....

We ended up with a 12 kilo Bluenose for our troubles, out there, and a bit more knowledge for a future trip out wide.

Good luck  out there and happy fishing.

Andy Kerr-Stingray Charters-Whitianga