Fishing for Trevally in Spring

Craig Worthington discusses fishing for trevally in Spring...

Spring was already well underway before my local trevally run got started. They had been slow to show up. I had started to worry. Friends in Auckland had been catching good numbers of trevally already, while other friends in Tauranga had been talking of a “trevally drought.” For a while there I didn’t know which way my Bay of Islands trevally season was going to go.

Then I caught four fish in a busy half-hour down at the local beach. All was good in the world again.

This was after the wind had changed to an onshore nor’easter and the ocean had turned that lovely springtime sea-green colour. The trevally had obviously been waiting for the inshore sea conditions to improve. With a warmer wind blowing and a small easterly swell rolling in it was game on!

I went out the next afternoon and tried again. Fairly quickly I hooked into a beast of a trevally that took me on a merry old dance up the rock ledge, stripped loads of line off the reel, and tied me up comprehensively in the kelp. That fish effectively gave me the finger.

All I could do was shrug my shoulders and curse a little bit. Bust-offs are just a reality you have to endure when fishing for trevally.

Even the little guys can give you problems. And in a heavy reef environment (or around a wharf) the big ones are just about impossible. Despite being sand-loving creatures, they rarely wander too far from a rock or wharf pile on which to smash you up.

That’s kind of why I like them… and for the mysteries they possess. You never really know what they are doing or where they are going to turn up next. Along inshore coasts, they don’t show themselves on the surface and in green inshore water you never really know if they’re there or not. Even in a berley trail they can be nervous ‘grey ghosts’ that don’t hang around for long. They are always smart, suspicious, and very cunning.

However, they can be fooled, and lures or flies cast from the shore are a great way of fooling them. It is the heavier action lures that have worked for me in the past. Things like zed spinners, salmon spoons, shad-tailed softbaits, and anything that puts out a good vibration. They will hit big lures, but the smallest lure you can adequately cast is generally the way to go.

There are different themes among the flies that trevally like to eat. It’s impossible to get the same sort of heavy vibration out of a fly so the emphasis is more on natural movement and match-the-hatch. Flies that have plenty of marabou and fur and enough weight to get down to the bottom are in with a chance.

What can’t be tied to the end of your line is dedication. This pursuit requires plenty of it. You have to keep walking, keep taking your lure/fly to the fish, and continually keep trying to figure out where the trevally might be. But the rewards are there.

When I was seventeen, I cast a small zed spinner off a Northland river mouth at dawn and caught a lovely fat-sided trevally in a gentle springtime surf. The golden rays of dawn reflecting off that trevally’s head as it emerged from the salty suds with my zed spinner in its mouth remain etched in my brain forever. That is why these fish are special.

I also used bait and berley a lot for trevally in those days. Around the wharves, it seemed like the only way to extract these structure lovers from their home amongst the piles. We would use stout handlines and hang on to the rail for dear life. It was exciting fishing.

These days I look for trevally in kinder habitats. Call me old, but I’ve grown tired of that white-knuckle wharf game, and the stress and the panic that goes with every hookup.

The ultimate for me now is to connect with them in the surf or in any sand and mud environment where they can find nothing to rub you on.

To this end, I’m searching my fly fishing flats for good trevally potential. It’s not easy. My total trevally catch in this environment on fly stands at the grand total of one! There have been plenty of snapper, kahawai, and parore to catch along the way, but it is the trevally that are the real prize. My Tauranga friends regularly get trevally on their harbour flats, so there is still plenty of hope. It remains a work in progress.

Possibly I need to get out of the Bay of Islands. The big harbours of Northland should give me better prospects for success. Parengarenga, Houhora, Rangaunu, Hokianga, Whangarei, and the Kaipara have great trevally reputations. I’ll be visiting them whenever I can.

If I lived further south some of the east and west coast harbours in the middle of the North Island would be in my fishing plan as well. Raglan, Kawhia, Tauranga, Port Waikato and the river estuaries of the Coromandel peninsula all produce great catches of trevally.

Even Wellington Harbour and the northern portion of the South Island are turning on good trevally fishing these days. Warming seas may have something to do with it. All that water moving through Cook Strait makes the sand and reef environments on either side ideal places for trevally to fatten up and grow.

And Auckland isn’t left out in the cold. From inner city reefs to Tamaki Drive, and along all those sheltered harbour beaches, excellent trevally are taken. And don’t forget the west coast.

For springtime trevally, Auckland is obviously one place to be.

November 2023 - Craig Worthington
New Zealand Fishing News Magazine.
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