Fishing Reports

Overview

After the driest summer / autumn in many many years, we are now getting flogged by endless fast moving subtropical lows, coming from the west or Norhthwest.This is making for poor water colour, lots of driftwood, and not many fishable days!

Inshore

If you can't catch snapper now them maybe try another sport!  This is always the best time in Whitianga for snapper fishing, for the masses. Good fishos can pull them all year round, but april-july here is always the easiest, as the fish feed voraciously to put on condtion, and the spawning issues and other distractions are gone. They have just one job- get fat for winter or starve! Snapper have been caught in great numbers everywhere for the last 2 months, as they get on with the job as mentioned.

They can be found still out on the sand, in 20-50m, but the best action at this time of year is always on the edges where the reef meets the sand. Any depth from 10-40m will do, and even deeper as it cools down. Just get on the upcurrent edge of some good foul, and start to burley. Run a mixture of strayline and ledger rigs, as you never know which method is working best on the day, until you use both simultaneously. The last trip we targetted snapper on, due to uncooperative tides for Kingfish, saw all the best fish come off the straylines well back from the boat, in 14-17m of water. At other times the good old ledger has totally done the business, especially on the deeper reefs.

People here are getting good snapper all the way from Cemetary point, right out to Red Merc.  It doesnt seem to matter where, as long as you deploy the right tactics. Friends have nailed  fish to 8 kilos out around Red /  Double, others just choosing to stay in our bay, and doing just as well. Remember to take several baits too, as this can and will change from day to day and during the day!

Offshore

Well its pretty much all over Gamefish wise, other than the odd random sighting of late staying striped marlin, rounding up bait at the Alderman pins. Kingfish are going well, when the weather permits, with good fish being landed all along the 70-120m foul, north and south of here. More people are starting to use live biats here too, resulting in some bigger fish, that generally are too smart ot hit the jigs. Having said that, its hard to beat the ease and lack of complexity of jig fishing , for most anglers.

Always try several different jig colours at once if there are several anglers, and match jig weights to wind and tide situations- you can't jig BEHIND the boat, you need to jig UNDER the boat, so go up in jig weight accordingly, or stay on the motor backing up slowly.

Hapuka fishing will just get better and better now, if you can get the right weather, as this is by far turning out to be our biggest problem at present.

Supplementary Article from Andy Kerr:   Something to think about over winter...

Marlin Lure Size

While most of you are putting away your lure bags at this point, unless heading off to the Kings, for next season have a think about lure size.....

With our Striped Marlin being notorious for dropping lures, give some thought to lure size. Whilst anglers get excited at just the thought of towing BIG lures, a lot of the time these bigger lures enjoy a poor hookup rate on Stripy's. Thats just fine if you live somewhere with all blues, but here in NZ the Stripy is the mainstay of our billfishery, and yet many seem to be towing lures fitting for that "once in a lifetime" fish,either Blue or Black. Those same lure see many Stripys come in and whack them , but far too often falling off or never hooking up in the first place.

This is a product of two things, firstly the BIG hooks you have in your  BIG lure, and secondly the overall length and size of you lure. Many years ago Rick Pollock, the most significant mentor in my fishing career, used to have a fit when I brought out big monster pushers that I had just purchased here or overseas, the Pakula Smoking Jo being a good example, on this day. I duly hurled it over the side with two 12/0 mustad 7691s in it and proceeded to fish it on 24kg tackle, further horrifying Rick.

As luck (and it was luck) would have it, I had the co-operative stripy rush in off North Cape and just pin himself to that lure, driving one 12/0 right up thru the roof of his mouth, and out the top! You can imagine my "peacock strut" after that fish was tagged !!  It took me years to realise that only occasionally they squashed the hook home, with their powerful jaw pressure, as instinct tells them to squash / stun fish, to incapacitate them before swallowing -would you go down a marlins throat willingly??

As the years go by , I am using smaller lures again much more often, and can't help noticing how much better the hookup ratio is. This is for two reasons-firstly the smaller, finer hooks you SHOULD be using in your smaller lures will penetrate far more easily and secondly - its not rocket science- the smaller lure being able to be COMPLETLY engulfed by the fish , thus increasing the chance of having a hook actually  inside his mouth, or even two hooks.!!.

An English client who has fished with me for over a decade on two different boats, was having trouble this season getting a Stripy to the boat, we just kept having them fall off, in the most unusual ways, mid fight and end fight, neither of which normally give us a problem.

In frustration I lent  him one of my (until recently) irreplacable personal Mosquitos, made years ago in Australia. Loaded with two needle sharp thin guage hooks, this lure put in only two days of service before a stripy came up, attacked the 5.5 zuker, fell off, attacked the Lumo Sprocket or Beer Barrel( I forgot which), fell off, the went back to the Zuker, fell off again, and finally engulfed the Mosquito and was totally pinned, on BOTH hooks!!

There was no way that fish was ever going to get off, looking at the hook penetration when we finally got it to the boat, for tagging.  It turned out to be his only fish for the season, and that was the difference !!!!

Good Fishing

Andy Kerr-Stingray Charters-Whitianga