Got out again yesterday over low tide for another mixed bag. Lost what felt like a real decent snapper when the line broke at the hook.... Damn!

No trevally for us today, but spoke to someone at Cornwallis getting the boat out and they got a couple and were fishing pretty close (500m) from us. Go figure. Water temp 15.1c too

I said last post that I hope Kingfish would be here soon.... Well bugger me, first fish of the day was a 55cm Kingie Ate a straylined pilchard. For a small fish it put up a great fight!

Plenty of small 25-30cm snapper, and we took a couple of decent pannies home. Flicked the softbaits round in less than 2m of water and had fun on some absolutely massive kahawai. Real donkeys. Biggest is 63cm and FAT as. Great fun, and great eating too.

I'm used to free diving for my scallops, but I've gone soft apparently

Tried a dredge for the first time in some of my old spots, without much luck. Got a dozen or so, 3 legal. Very poor condition though, so no point yet, still too early.

Any tips on using a dredge?

The weather was perfect, the fishing was not.  I was catching lots of small kahawai, and I even caught a small snapper.  I was probably the only angler on the water up until midday.  I also saw a boat perched on the rocks at Weymouth.  It was an odd sight to see, but glad to hear no one was injured.

They described him as an "experienced skipper", yet according to the statement of facts he broke just about every rule in the book.  Very sad that lives were lost in a completely avoidable tragedy.

OK well I'll let you know Sunday evening hehe

Hey smudge, just after a bit of advice re. chasing snaps out over the Manukau - figured you'd be the one to ask being a regular out that way!

Are you trying to mark some fish on the sounder initially and then drifting through them with ledger/flasher rigs? Or just picking a likely looking area and dropping the anchor? And if anchoring, is berley the way to go or just a recipe to be plagued by sharks?

We do it a little differently. While we will have a tootle around looking for fish sign we won't be too bothered if we don't find any if it's spring time. With little structure there is nothing to really hold fish. By using baits the fish will come to us once a few baits have hit the bottom. They way I see it is imagine two similar sized areas, one that's flat with say 20 snapper in it randomly spread out. That's the west coast The other sea floor is the same size but has a couple of rocks scattered around it, with the same amount of snapper congregated around each of the rocks. That's how I imagine the Hauraki Gulf mostly. Of course that's just my analogy and nothing quite like it really is but my point is that there is little to hold a bunch of fish in one spot - there's just a heap of them all spread out all over the place.

Anyway, after all that BS we always anchor and generally use light gear. I use 10lb braid with a 20lb leader for jigs and I'll use 60 to 120g jigs in those depths. If I use baits which I generally do, I'll tie a 60 to 80lb trace, usually just a two or single hook dropper with an 8/0 recurve hook. We tend to use just single hooks these days. We use 4 to 6oz sinkers.

Just with jigs and softbaits, they work very well at this time of the year, but from an anchored boat once the fish find your baits, as long as your mates are still bait fishing the snapper will smash your lures.

As Rowboat said, burley is great but be prepared for tope and kahawai to turn up.  Burley will get the fish in quicker but yeah there is a price to pay and we use it more when fishing the shallows, but once the fish get a whiff of your baits  they generally stick around. On a good day it's not too uncommon to  bin up in an hour or so - especially with heavier gear and 2 hooks.

A usual stop on the sandbanks to give the dog a run around. Its quite surreal being in what feels like the middle of the harbour surrounded by water.