It is a true privilege to be able to get up to the Far North once a year to experience the incredible fishery on offer. This year, I managed to fluke four days of excellent late autumn conditions – including two glass out mornings – sandwiched between nasty storm fronts sweeping in courtesy of La Nina.

The trip was the usual roller coaster of emotions, from the high of a nice kingie on softbait gear while fishing solo early on, to having the sobering experience of what I can confidently say is the biggest snapper I’ve ever hooked being devoured by what must have been a scarily large shark in the open sea off Great Exhibition Bay. In between, my mate – who joined me for two days – and I landed and released multiple fish over 70cm on softbaits (the biggest, 76cm), and kept some lovely trevally and snapper for fresh kai moana, and to vacuum pack for families back home.

At the start of the trip, Rangaunu Bay was full of dirty water and weed – the legacy of the previous week’s deluges flushing out from Rangaunu and Houhora harbours. But huge flocks of shearwaters were working along the coast up towards Cape Karikari, where the water seemed clearer. There were large numbers of hungry snapper and trevally underneath that were keen to nail softbaits on the drop. At times, every cast ripped up tight. In the quick, but memorable, late afternoon session I squeezed in the day I arrived, I got six nice trevally and about 20 snapper to the boat – mostly on Gulp Crazy Legs in various colours. Sometimes fish jolted lures hard as they were wound back, and I had several double hook ups, with the dragging lure in the holder nailed as I was playing a fish hooked on the drop.

In the following days, the sea gradually cleared – returning to stunning blue visibility. Fortunately, that coincided with my mate Chris joining me for a couple of days. We saw something I haven’t seen before: huge schools of blue maomao and sweep 10m down, well off the coast in 35m of water off the Houhora cliffs. We also saw a long-lasting bust up of what I assume must have been decent tuna or potentially kingies well out towards the horizon, and a big kingie exploding in circles right in on the beach as it chased a panicking victim.

I was thrilled to hook snapper on my home-tied squid imitation ‘skutes’ (on ½ oz jigheads tied in the Avalon fly style, with rabbit fur strips alongside the main body); and had a ghostly coloured john dory, an impressively bucket-mouthed granddaddy hapuku, and a red pig fish smack large softbaits over broken foul.

While smaller Z Man curly tails and Gulp Crazy Legs were the stars of the show over the sand, my best weapon in the reefy country was the big Z Man Doormatadorz 6" grub in Atomic Sunrise (with a Z Man skirt at the head), closely followed by the 7” jerk shadz in Coral Trout and Bruised Banana. Away from the sand, anything Gulp got shredded in seconds.