Roll on Spring !!

OVERVIEW

Finally things warm up- after a long cold winter we are now seeing all the good things about spring- a few more settled days, warmer (slightly) water temps and with that, better fishing. Labour weekend saw all 3 days fishable-amazing considering the rubbish we have endured all winter.!!

INSHORE

It's still patchy inshore unless you can get right in close (sub 8 m) for some wintered-over fish. Snapper  in 10-25m has also been a struggle a lot of the time, especially during the middle of the day.

Local expert John Ellwood on the "Whai" has been doing extremely well, but always does, whilst many others have struggled on the inshore scene. We have consitently done well on snapper, and at times terakihi, but have stayed out over 40 metres whenever possible, on the deeper low foul. Overnighting if you can certainly makes a huge difference when it comes to getting consistent snapper catches, being there for the dawn and dusk shot.

Interestingly the snapper we have caught recently have all had some amount of roe developement, in fact quite a bit  more advanced than I would have expected at these (15.7- 16.0) water temperatures.

Massive Kahawai and trevally schools are everywhere, gorging themselves on whitebait, and this generally makes for reliable fresh bait if you can get them to take a hook.

OFFSHORE

Deep water  bait and jig fishing  for Kingfish has been good all winter when the weather has let us out wide. Kingfish jigging has been good, and briefly exceptional, as Carl from Epic Charters  in Tairua found out recently, as he hooked a number of much bigger Kingfish  than is the norm here, on jigs.

Hapuka fishing has been excellent as well, with plenty of  10-15 kilo fish available from 100-200 metres. There has even been a run of Bluenose along our coast, a fish normally living too deep for us to have a crack at, without travelling 50 miles or so. border="1" hspace="10"

We were fortunate to have a taste of this over the weekend, whilst enjoying good hapuka action.One of my regular anglers George Baloghy from Auckland, almost disappeared over the side of the boat when he hooked up to a "freight train" fish on monday, while drifting baits for Hapuka. A good time and big tussle later he had a 26 kilo Bluenose in the boat, a fantastic fish, especially for here. Another charter boat also caught a 21 kilo bluenose a couple of days earlier in the same area.

A similar situation happened last year, near the Aldermans, but the Bluenose were much smaller , around 4-6 kilos each. Long may it last I say!!!

Things should only improve now in general, so make sure your boat is well serviced, after sitting idle all winter, as the radio was full with breakdowns here over the weekend.

Good Fishing

Andy Kerr-Stingray Charters-Whitianga.