Fishing Reports

 Hi All

Well autumn is well and truly here, the days are getting shorter and with it the snapper and kingi fishing has picked up noticeably.

Summer still produced some great fishing for kings and snapper but, apart from first thing in the morning, the bite times were short and sporadic.  Then mid-late Feb it started to pick up. We tagged and released 183 kingis over the last week of February fishing the NZ Nationals - all solid hard fighting Tairua kingis too up to about 23kg.  We still had to work pretty hard for those fish but they were defintely biting harder than earlier in the month.

Since then, through the first week of March, the bite times seem to be lasting for longer and the fishing over the last week has been more consistent.

The snapper are biting for longer during the day too and the shallows and washes are starting to produce some consistently good fish during the day on softbaits.

For kingis the hot jig for us over the last week has been Broken Arrow 400gm in either green, blue or black.  These seem to be fishing very well at present.  

Livies are also working well on the deeper reefs and we picked up three line weight divisions (15kg,10kg and 8kg) in the Nationals fishing quite big live trevally as livies for kingis.

Inshore there is still some great kingi fishing and we've had some mindblowing mornings watching kingis taking poppers, livies and dead swimming baits (piper) - while I love the hit of a kingi inhaling a jig there is nothing quite like seeing a surface take from a hungry kingi first thing in the morning in the shallows!

The gamefishing is still well and truly on.  We stuck to our game plan of kingis in the Nationals while we listened to one of the hottest bites in a long time - boat after boat hooking up on marlin at the Hook off Red Merc and the Footprint off Cuvier.  The boats fishing reported 24 degree electric blue water, manta rays and pack attacks of hungry  marlin.

The water has greened up a bit close to the Aldies since the last storm but is still very warm with loads of baitfish.  If last Autumn is anything to go by there should be plenty of life left in the season yet!  Time to get amongst it!

Cheers

Carl

www.epicadventures.co.nz