Fishing Reports

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WINTERLESS NORTH THEORY???

Overview

Quite an icy mean winter here so far, onshore, with trying conditions for weeks on end, out at sea.
Water temps are still surprisingly high at 15.2 to 15.7, given land temps are seriously single digits on many days!!
 

Inshore

When you can get out....aarrghh!  Snapper fishing has been pretty good. You have to go deep or go to heavy foul or foul edge to get the results though.

Quite a few big fish still falling to small baits as their metabolism slows up, but also in some places and some days only the big bait will do the trick, make sure you always have BOTH out to be covered.

Terakihi fishing is quiet inshore , but they are abundant at the 100m mark, on smaller ledger(not hapuka)
size dropper rigs. There are still almost no fish out on the sand, except over 60 metres.
 

Deep Reefs

Yes amazing !!- "Stingray" actually got out wide to the deep reefs on wednesday at last, after many false starts.

Kingfish fishing was good, with a hot bite thru the middle of the tide, tapering towards low. The barracouta were absent-great- and we enjoyed good jigging until the tide slowed up. One of our trip members and kingfish deep jigging virgin Kelvin "Jonah" Beere from Auckland had a ball, hooking most of the fish and the biggest one as well, so an excellent introduction for him into this great form of fishing, and starting off the right way , he released all but one of these fish, to fight another day.

On another note, his biggest kingi had quite serious fungal diease marks on it entire body. Yet again I would like to take this opportunity to remind all kingi jiggers NOT to handle their fish if they are releasing them. Really - there is no need to handle them at all, even if photographing them - See my earlier archived articles re handling and Niwa fungal disease findings, and you will find that we don't touch them AT ALL, unless we are keeping them.
 

Hey- Lets conserve an awesome fishery!!!!!

Good Fishing
Andy Kerr-Stingray Charters-Whitianga