4 yak fishing trip reports in one

Author: josh

Category: Trip Reports

Created on Wednesday, 29 December 2010 18:59

Written by Josh

My past four trips out have all been fairly eventless - 2 outings at Sandon, 2 at Woody Head. Eventless partly due to lack of fish (save for the last occaission), partly due to bad conditions, but mainly due to an injured hand that has not only made each of these trips difficult, it's also made them short. It wasn't until heading out early Monday morning when it became apparent just how much this injury would affect my fishing. The exact moment that I realized it was probably worse than I'd been pretending was when I started trying to cast lures and reel them in frantically.

I was trying to do this because there were fish everywhere. More fish in a concentrated area (middle reef) than I've seen in a long time. The water was thick with mackerel and the bait fish they were feeding on. And with a great deal of frustration, I quickly realised that cast and retrieving would be my best strategy to hook up. And it was... but it only took a few casts and one small fish for me to put a stop to the casting. Although there was enough wind to sail, I couldn't get going at the speeds required to catch their attention. There were a lot of boats motoring around (some of them having more success than me) as well and eventually this started to feel a bit like a game of frogger, so matters conspired to encourage my departure. I did, however, have a couple of really good hook ups on the way back in.

The first one came right as I passed through the Shark bay hot-zone and as soon as my reel started screaming I knew that I'd hooked a shark. This was confirmed when I started fighting the fish, though it managed to bite through the line before I managed to sight it. Immediately I turned around, cast out my other lure and sailed right over the hot zone again, once again hooking up to another shark and once again having the line chomped soon after taking up the fight. In hind sight this was probably a good thing. not only had I forgot to pack my gaff hook, there was no way I was going to be wrestling any sharks aboard with my hand the way it is. 

I shall return... and this time I will be armed with wire trace! But maybe I'll just persist with the mackerel while they're here and give the hot zone a wide berth until I've given myself a chance to heal.