Hey y'all!  Well, I figure I may as well let you guys know about my misadventures in learning about saltwater fishing, maybe it will help some other new fish someday! ;)

 Was supposed to go to Coral Bay last week but our friend Nicholas derailed that plan, so we went down to Busselton instead.  It was me, the wife, the in-laws(from the states), and a mate and his wife from here in Perth.  We had my mate's boat with us and hoped to get into some good fish, though we had to put in some fam time and knew we wouldn't be able to fish the whole time.

 Wed. we went out in the morning for some trolling around the cape, but it was blowing and we were really getting bounced...no joy, so we headed back towards Bton, stopping at a likely looking spot in about 20m of water to bounce the bottom.  We caught too many fox wrasse, a few 'cod-like' fish that I couldn't identify, and I had a nice fight with a 2kg skippy on light tackle.  We took the skippy home for tea and returned the rest.

Later that day and Thursday continued the close in fishing with family that didn't want to get out in the chop, looked for salmon from dunno to the cape but saw nothing.  All three days we were on the bay we had an easterly blowing us around.

 Here's where I reveal my inexperience....we wasted three days bouncing around in the cape.....and friday was gonna be our last day there.  Friday we get up and decide to take a ride out to Canal Rocks for some rock-hopping and snorkeling.  After climbing around for awhile, we decided to hike up to an overlook and check out the coast....WOW!  As soon as we got up there, we couldn't believe two things:

1. The seas were flat as a tack...

2. and there were bait balls EVERYWHERE!  from just south of Canal Rocks up to south of Sugarloaf we counted 10-12 baitballs in the course of just a few minutes, from within 100m of shore to as far out as we could see.

My mate and I made our apologies and pushed everyone into the van so we could race back to Bton for the ute and the boat!  took us almost an hour to get back, fuel up and get the boat in the water.  We had two med/heavy baitcasting rigs for trolling and two med. spin rods for casting.  Within a few hundred meters north of the boat ramp we saw a small school of what we think were salmon working some baitfish.  We stopped off for a few casts but the school had already moved on by the time we got there.  We were keen to get out into some tuna/mackeral so we headed out.

As we got out into 20+m of water off Smith's beach we started seeing huge schools of bait on the fish finder just under the surface, along with continuing to see baitballs around us.  None of these lasted for more than a few minutes....is that typical for them to last such a short time?  We saw a pod of dolphins working a school, which was pretty cool.  Saw some fish that looked like mackeral leaping out of the water within half a kilometer from us at one point, don't know if they were feeding or getting fed on....

We ran out our two trolling rigs, one with a red-head Halco LP at 3m depth, the other with a met. blue Halco Crazy Deep.  With in 15 minutes we were hooked up in about 25m of water.  Enjoyed a decent fight from a small mackeral.  He measured 35cm and we thought he was a shark mack so we bled/iced him.  I'm now pretty sure that we got that one wrong.  This fish was blue, not greenish and had horizontal stripes, not dots.  When I fileted him later, his flesh was very dark, but when we fried him it was a nice flaky white....tasted beautiful.  Any ideas on the id? it was defnitely a mack head(sharp nosed with plenty of teeth), blue body with horizontal striping.  definitely need to get a pocket id book until i figure out more about what's what!

So we're super-stoked and ready for the best afternoon fishing of our lives.  Then somebody flipped the switch, all the bait balls disappeared, we couldn't coax a thing, on the fish finder all the schools of baitfish had moved to the bottom.  We continued trolling for awhile...nothing.  We went north to see if the fish had moved....nothing.  We tried bouncing jigs around some good marks on the finder....nothing.  switched to cut bait...nothing.

Overall, we had a blast last week, but can't help but think that we might have missed out on some great fishing while we goofed around in the bay!  lesson learned.....know I've got a lot more to learn!