Sword Fish & Surface Liners

The last couple of months have been a little slow, to say the least!  Trying to keep crew morale at a high when we are stuck fishing the coast and when they know, exactly how good the fishing can be elsewhere, well it's tough! 

Anyway I have some what enjoyed the slower fishing, because it woke me up and, well, I had to work a whole lot harder.  I enjoyed keeping a sharp eye on all the things that lead us to fish; temperature, watercolor, structure, current, bait and birds.  The latter, in my view, being the most important.  We caught a couple of fish off the coast just by watching how a single bird was flying.  The other reason why I have enjoyed fishing on the coast is the same as with rough weather, "the sweet aint as sweet with out the sour".  Because boy, can the Wanganellas make you a lazy fisherman!

So with out a word of a lie, we were gagging for it! We couldn't wait to get back up there and even with the presence of the film crew from "The Fishing Show" We had nothing to worry about, right!? 

Our Trip went like this;
18th 6 fish
19th 3 fish
20th 6 fish
21st 3 fish
22nd 3 fish
The fish were there.  We know this from the pack attacks we were getting once a day, but by this stage I was getting anxious. Trying to think up any excuse why the fish weren't biting well, and every skipper will tell you that the fish know when there is a film crew onboard.  The other reason I will note is the presence of 4 surface liners.

23rd 3 fish!!!
Tonight was the full moon and the marlin SHOULD have been snapping their heads off over the last couple of days, however, seeing as they weren't we decided to hit a small piece of foul for a sword.  After releasing a reasonable stripey we then settled in for a long night.  But it wasn't to be that long, and after a 40-minute fight; we had our first wanganella bank swordfish in the boat.

24th 9 fish
25th 11 fish
26th 8 fish
Over the moon the surface liners moved off and the fishing picked up, and we even got into some meat ball fishing and caught a couple of double and triple headers.  We had some fantastic weather for the last few days and it allowed us to get some awesome underwater footage of marlin from our towable camera, not to mention some spectacular night time sword fish action, above and below the water.  So look out for the episodes on "The Fishing Show".

Good Fishing
Tom