Cheers Wefaknis

 

Next time ill take the phone out of the glad bag before trying to take some photo's..  ..so I've got some water shots to post, was pretty gorgeous out there at times today..

 

Alex

 

So i couldn't wait for the weekend, the weather was looking gorgeous, the boat was sitting in the drive, my mate had taken the day off (he has to work the weekend, sucker!) and Mum wanted some fish for dinner.. it was on!

 

We launched from Beachlands Boat Ramp at 9am and headed around into the Marina to get some gas from the Jetty, filled up the tank and pottered over to the Chandlery for a pie, ate that in the Marina and watched the barge come in with the big digger from dredging..

We left there around 9:30 after filling the boat with gas and ourselves with smoked fish pies and headed out to Waiheke side of Sergent's channel..

..anchored up in what i think would have been 10 meters (fish finder still on the fritz) and sent out a couple of real bait rigs, let them do their thing and threw a burley into the water, ground up afew squids and pillies together in the mincer and chucked handfulls of that in-front of the boat to drift down past us while i played with a sp set.. After an hour and not the slightest hint of anything we decided to move over to Motuihe Is where we had seen afew other boats, anchored up in about 7meters and threw the burley, minced up baits and straylines out..

My mate had a two hook flasher rig on with about 3oz of lead above the swivel baited with a chunk of pillie and a whole squid while i did my usual two hook dropper rig(??) trick of a whole squid on the top hook and an old sp on the bottom hook..

NZ-Jamie came up with the goods first and delivered a healthy 35cm Snapper..

.. and from then it was on, i landed six all legal Snapper and a couple of Kahawai, two of them going back along with a couple of the smaller Kahawai, again the sp left alone on a worm hook at the bottom of my straylined rig did the most damage with only one snapper falling to my Squid and the rest munching down the pink shine.

 

I also was jiggling a plastic from my new dedicated sp setup the whole day but nothing seemed interested , i tried a whole bunch of different sps including Pink Shine, Ark Shiner, Nuke Chook, Black Capula, Lime Tiger, Red Sand Worm, Natural color Squid, Nuke Chook Prawns and even threw out a Rattlin Worm from Storm i got in the states but nothing i gave them made a difference, no-body wanted a bar of it. I'm beginning to think my technique will have to change drastically with this new rod to match the success on sps i was having with my boat rod and surfcaster matchup..

Around 3:30 the bite started to really slow and the only thing of interest we came across was a meter and a bit eel that had taken a fancy to Jamies pillie chunk..

..we cut him loose and it was getting on so the decision was made for last baits and i started cleaning up, a minute later another snapper fell victim to the Pink Shine on the two hook rig with the expert rod holder making the strike, so that was my line out and I started taking photos as by then the water had really flattened out and looked amazing..

20 Minutes later NZ-Jamies bait had gone and we were heading back to the ramp..

Back home and cleaned up, by 5pm i was gutting and filleting the fish..

and by 7pm i was enjoying fish for dinner..

 

Another great trip and feed of fish, I'm hoping the weathers going to be like this tomorrow, if so I'm there!

 

Alex.