Sweet sweet Sweetlip

Author: dunebuggy

Category: Trip Reports

Created on Wednesday, 27 October 2010 14:29

Written by Stuart Whitehouse

After all the rain and poor conditions we have had it's good to be getting kayak fishing offshore again. I haven't done anything in the way of reports as there wasn't much to report. Nothing fabulous anyway. The most exciting thing that happened was my 1st yak whale encounter. None of my photos were much good and you've all seen Josh's whale photos so mine would have been nothing short of disappointing in comparison.

That was last Sunday and it was a great morning out with 2 nice sweetlip in the bag. The biggest of the two being a personal best and taken from a spot that Yakass member "Bailz" had stumbled on recently. Brian (aka; paddleparra) did a little better on numbers and on the day that Bailz found this spot Brian got a 60 plus cm sweetlip among others. Seems to be a good spot for big sweetlip.

Tuesday I fished in Moooloolah River with yakass member Doug (wombatx8) and did a prefish for the KFT with results that confirmed to us both that we should stick with our initial plan from last month. Today, Wednesday, October 27th, I launched from the Kings Beach boat ramp at 4.30am and had a cloudy Sunrise at 5am. It was a tad windier than expected but still pleasant.

There was a phenomenal amount of baitfish in the water and occasional boils when predators drove them to the surface. I have no idea what they were and could not tempt them with metal slugs or soft plastics. What ever they were, they were small. There seemed to be an abundance of fish in general when looking at the sounder and I got the impression that everything was well fed.

Obviously there is always room for just one more mouthful though. I still managed one snapper and 3 sweetlip for my efforts but I dropped the snapper and released the smallest sweetlip although it was of legal size. When it comes to snapper and sweetlip I prefer them both to be 40 plus cms before I consider keeping them.

Water quality is still down a bit because of all the run off from recent rains but it doesn't seem to have put the fish off at all. They are actively feeding and there seems to be plenty of them. You just need to offer them something they are interested in. It didn't seem to matter what soft plastic was used this morning. In the finish the were 3 of us in close proximity and all using different soft plastics and all catching fish. Greg (aka; hardplastic) caught 3 snapper in a row in a short period of time and eventually headed for shore to go to work.

I made it a relatively short trip for myself this morning as I forgot to take ice along and it when the cloud cleared the sun came out with a vengance. I put the lures out and trolled back to shore with a nil result on the lures and with only a 2 foot swell hitting the ramp at kings, I casually slipped my Tastech Terminator wheel cart under the revo and dragged it up the ramp to the car. I was home and had gear washed by about 11am. Apologies for no photos but I think you all know what snapper and sweetlip look like by now.