I’m a summer person through and through, and the thought of spending the NZ winter in Bali casting topwater for GT, eating Nasi Goreng, and watching gin-induced sunsets is quite appealing. In the meantime, I’ll have to put up with NZ winters and sending it into the winter shallows in search of dogs.
Date – 2/9/22
Crew – Sam Pillidge & Greg Potter
High tide – 10:30am
Launch – 7:30am
Bite – average, with no visible bite time, fish biting all day.
Longest fish – est 69cm, released.
Player of the day – Berkley PowerBait Fork Tail Minnow – Disco Violet
Number of fish caught – approx 25
Back on the trailer – 4:30 pm
It’s always good taking Greg Potter for a skid, as he is also an expert-level free diver, and you know he’s going to deliver a couple of crays for the bin and hopefully some Paua. So on this cold winter’s day, we threw Greg in on the high tide, and he returned with a nice red and a just legal packhorse cray. I prefer packies over reds; I find them sweeter than the stock standard red cray. They are harder to cook, being such a big animal, but once you have that sorted. You are good to go. Singaporean chilli crab is my favourite cray dish, obviously jsut swapping the crab out for cray. If you haven’t tried it, give it a nudge, and your taste buds will thank you.
The morning started sluggishly with a leisurely launch at 7:30 am, which saw us casting not long after. Unfortunately, we didn’t catch a fish for about 2 hours! Situations like this never deter me, and it becomes a case of narrowing down where the fish are sitting. I’ve always got my favoured rocks where we have consistently caught nice fish, but with shallow water fishing, fish often aren’t where you found them last time, with so many factors affecting where the fish will be. With bait being the number one sign I look for – no bait – no dogs.
Today, The fish were holding right up against the rocks, often in water as shallow as two metres, anything deeper than 8 metres, and you were out of the zone. I usually find 5-10 metres best, but if things start slow, you have to prospect and identify where the fish are holding.
Today was also about switching it up with lures. Usually, I’m a Gulp! Maniac. And with good reason, they are so effective. However, I’ve been trialling some new soft plastics from Berkley, and the results have been phenomenal, with today’s biggest fish comfortably falling to the new PowerBait Fork Tail Minnows. The colour coordination on the new lures is mental, with some seemingly changing colours once in the water. I feel like snapper are a sucker for new lures they haven’t encountered, and no NZ snapper have come across the Fork Tail Minnows. The baits are dry and infused with PowerBait formula, so once a fish bites, it keeps going until it’s eaten the lure or hooked. I’m getting about three fish per lure, sometimes more, depending on size, which is a pretty acceptable number for a plastic lure. The lures themselves are lethal, and you fish them much the same way as any soft plastic; I give the Fork Tails plenty of hang time and darting twitches on the retrieve. They get smacked as much on the drop as they do the retrieve. Whereas with Gulp! I’m all about the twitch and retrieve, and 95% of my fish are hooked this way.
All in all, a very productive day, even if it was an average bite!
Frothing for the next one.
