Since July I've been fishing from Bean Rock to Rangi channel and Motuihe channel with a mixture of smelly bait, and kaburas and soft baits. From August onwards I stopped anchoring up, and have been drifting the Rangi and Motuihe channels only. Apart from one good day probably early September, the catches have been ordinary, 1 to 3 snapper and sometimes KY. The good day was memorable mainly for the fish I lost. I got a good snapper, approx 60cm to within a few metres of the boat and it broke off. Was an accident waiting to happen. I tied a 10/0 hook straight onto 12lb mono and put a big piece of mullet on it. Serves me right, back to using traces now. That day was in the Rangi channel between 7 and 15 buoys on the north shore side of the channel - kept 5 snapper and released a couple of smaller legal ones.
I've been experimenting with different colours of kabura - orange/yellow (still my favorite) pink/white, green/red/ and yellow/brown, mainly dragged in the rodholder, but sometimes slow jigged. Overall very disappointing. They work in the summer, but not recently.
Soft baits seem to be improving and as always, it's worth putting a bit of work into them. My only catch last week was on a Zman 4" new penny curlytail seasoned with secret sauce and jiggled way out the back of the boat.
My last trip out was frustrating because there were workups all over the Rangi channel from up near the lighthouse to down off Narrow Neck. I didn't chase the workups because they were too fast-moving, but drifted through the tails of workups many times where there were still birds sitting on the water and the occasional KY chasing bait on the surface. On the negative side, I fished from around 10am to 1pm to get a wind-with-tide drift. Fishing in the middle of the day is usually less productive. On the positive side I had close-up views of the Team NZ yacht foiling round the Rangi channel. The rigging literally screams with the speed, so it whistled past with about 5 big rubber duckies chasing like hand-maidens. Awesome!
Be back out there doing it tomorrow early, and hoping for better fishing.