Winter 2023
Here are a few notes from the last few months. I've been fishing with smelly bait and have refined my method a little. I mainly fish in close and recently made mulptiple trips to Brown's Island. I anchor in about 5m of water and cast back towards structure. Berley is really important and I use the 3Kg mixed fish (not salmon) type that comes in a cardboard carton. Bring them out of the freezer a couple of hours before fishing otherwise they will be very slow to release their contents. I put them inside an onion bag which then goes into a wobble pot about 1 to 2m above the bottom.
As always I fish early mornings, but like to pick a day where the tide has just started to flow in or out, and the wind isn't too high. Friday this week looks OK, low wind, beginning of an incoming tide about 7:30am.
I use about a metre of 40lb fluorocarbon trace, no sinker or up to 1oz depending on depth and tide, and green flasher bead, and size 7 to 10 recurve or circle hooks. I like mullet as a bait and buy the fillets from YeeHaa. KY either freshly caught or from the freezer is also good. Also take a sprat rig (sabiki with squid bait) and use small KY or yellowtail, mainly as strip baits for snapper. I haven't seen many larger snapper this season, so don't bother with butterflied sprats.
Pump the berley, set up 3 rods in rodholders, catch some sprats and wait, pumping the berley every 10 minutes. Usually after 20 mins or so some keepers start biting and it can be all on from there. The fish I am keeping range from 32 to 48cms, but very few are over 42cms.
Sat 2/9/23 7:15 to 8:30am
Fished Browns Island on an outgoing tide. No keepers for about half an hour, then a flurry of them, often with 2 rods going off at the same time. Kept 7 snapper from 32 to 38cms, all caught in under an hour. Used about 3 Kgs of berley. Mullet and KY were the best baits.
I've also made trips to the Manukau and Kaipara targetting mainly gurnard, but with only moderate success.