Hauraki Gulf Fishing Report 210918

  • General Saltwater, Auckland and The Hauraki Gulf

I have to say that earlier this year I was very concerned about the stocks of snapper in the inner Hauraki Gulf. Over the years I have seen a decline in snapper numbers doing their normal migration run up the Motuihe and Rangitoto channels, and beyond, yet there has been more snapper in and around in close this winter than there has been for years.

Even better, is that it appears that things are heading back to normal with the start of the spawning season about to get underway. In the past, around this time of the year, we would see an advance guard of mainly big male snapper turn up around the Noises area for a few weeks before dispersing around the gulf. I will never forget the day a mate, and I went out to catch four snapper each for our families, and managed to use just eleven pilchards to catch them in less than half an hour!

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I am buggered if I know where these big male snapper go for the summer, but again in late April and early May they seem to turn up in the same place for another week or so.

Shooting out to the Rakino area for a bit of market research (for the benefit of my fellow man, of course), I was very pleasantly surprised at the amount and size of snapper showing up on the sounder. Sadly, I have to say that the scallops were a bit of a disappointment as there were too many divers to have a safe scratch around with the dredge. Before you start typing an angry response about dredges, unfortunately for me, I'm not allowed to dive anymore, so I'm now confined to what I can pick up with my dredge.

Now as I have always said you don't learn anything by going back and doing the same old thing in the same old spots, you have to try new things and measure cause and effect. Now is the time of the year to have a wee look around to see if anything has changed as it's the only way you will build up a bit of history to call on when the fishing is hard.

Some of you will know that the area around Awash rock is one of my go-to, 'never fail to catch a feed' spots. As the tide had just turned, I spent a bit of time checking out South Island (and no, not the big one at the bottom of the North Island!) which is just off the southern tip of Rakino. On the eastern side of the island, there is a contour line showing where the drop off from the island is hence there will be some early tidal pressure pushing around it.

Zig-zagging down the side of it there was a heap of snapper showing from 35-56 cm (Furuno AccuFish measures the length of the fish that go through the middle of the transducer) so by doing a big figure of eight I was able to determine roughly the volume of fish in size of the area showing on the chart plotter. Anchored in 17 meters, the stern was facing just inside the island so we could cast big baits back onto the area where the bottom was coming up. Long casts with a lightly weighted strayline rig meant that the baits would then land on the bottom at the base of the rise. Typical of pre-spawn snapper, they were just picking up and mouthing the baits, which meant your strike had to be perfectly timed or you had to change to a tougher bait such as a slab of kahawai. Even with kahawai as bait, your strike had to be perfect, as we dropped a hell of a lot of big snapper on the way up and even on the surface just behind the boat.

Long story short, the three of us called it a day once we had a dozen snapper in the live bait tank. On the way back to the marina I worked along a couple of the contour lines in the Rakino Channel, and as I suspected, the majority of the fish are on the edges of the drop-offs rather than on the flat bottom. Going through the Motuihe Channel, there was minimal sign showing on the sounder, yet in a direct line from Emu Rock to Bean Rock, there was a lot of fish showing on the flat sand.

All is looking good out there team, but please remember that you don't have to get back home dragging your knuckles along the ground and beating your chest like Neanderthal man bragging you got a limit bag. Every fish we take now is one that will not get to spawn so think of the future generations, so they get the same shot at catching a fish as we have.

Bruce Duncan

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