Persistence pays off

Author: josh

Category: Trip Reports

Created on Monday, 21 February 2011 09:55

Written by Josh

The past weekend was reminiscent of a similar weekend at the same place around the same time the year before. On the first day I got a lot of strong hits but each resulted in a chomped line, which I concluded to be the work of sharks. That night I went home, made a bunch of wire trace lines and returned the following day determined not to lose any lures. The plan worked, rewarding me with a 4' bully that soon became flake enough to feed half my street. 

It's ironic then that when the sharks started biting their heads off at Woody Head this weekend that most of the hook ups I encountered resulted in bust offs - even with wire tracers. The very same trace lines I'd made last year in fact. With every big hit one by one, each wire trace I tied on failed. Two were bitten right through, two failed at the snap clip and two more failed at the crimps. And when I finally ran out of tracer line and reluctantly tied on a Magnum CD to bare mono line, which not only survived the initial hit, but also the entire ensuing fight. What I thought was a shark in fact turned out to be yet another cobia, larger than the last two I've caught this summer and giving me a lot more curry yakside.

While all but one of the other hook ups came while trolling, every single one of them smashing Rapala Magnums (18 and 21cm sizes, various colours), the cobia took this lure as it was suspended in the water column while I was casting lures (at surfacing stripey tuna) with the other rod. What followed was a 15 minute brawl that came close to ending on the rudder and mirage fins, finishing up with one of the trickiest gaff jobs I've experienced in a while. A good 5kg heavier than my last catch, it also had a lot of extra strength and there was no bringing it in until tiring it out a little first. Eventually I prevailed, but not without getting a good arm workout first. Pulling it aboard signalled the end of a long sunny weekend on the water that was full of frustration, but ending in glory. 

It wasn't the only fight-worthy fish I pulled in on Sunday. Only a short while earlier myself and a couple of other kayak fishermen chanced upon a feeding frenzy, clearly the work of some kind of tuna herding up bait fish. I'm not sure how the other guys fared because all it took was one cast for me to hook up and then become distracted by the stripey tuna that had grabbed the flick bait soft plastic I threw out. At first I thought I'd hooked a longtail, so agressive was the fight in the fish. As usual I was wrong about the species of my prey and when I saw the size of the fish upon releasing it I was genuinely surprised at how well it fought.