With the wind being good, but the swell potentially bad outside the reef, I planned to give the “stirred up” inshore a crack tonight.  With the young one chasing a different type of pink I made a call to FW members to see if anyone wanted to come along.  Happily, Bryan and Adam agreed and as planned we left Hillarys a bit after 4pm.  Wind conditions were ideal but there was a fair bit of sea as residual chop from the swell breaking on the reef.  There was also some swell at times as the sets came through.

We went to new ground in about 8m and fished that fairly unsuccessfully for a couple of hours.  A few undesirables, a skippy and a few missed “potential” quality fish.  Before it got really dark, I made the call to move to a “rock” that has produced for me in the past.  It was a hard call because the “new” spot may ultimately have produced, and in hindsight we probably didn’t give it the go it deserved.

Anyway, my trusted spot wasn’t going much better.  I have learned however that the pinkies are a waiting game, burley hard and fish well-presented baits and you never know.  There were fish all over the sounder, obviously in the burley trail, so we persevered.  Adam was constantly catching the “rock” throwing the unweighted pilchard at it but he had clearly caught a few pinkies before and had his strategy.  It was still generally slow however.

At about 8pm Adam's gear went off.  Now this was a quality fish and had all of the characteristics of a big pink – solid fast runs and the head shakes.  The call was made to get everything out of the water as this fish would take a bit of landing and then disaster struck – no not a lost fish but Bryan in his haste dropped a combo over the side, bugger.  Needless to say Adam and I were a bit oblivious to all that at the time as he played the fish nicely and I was focused on the net.  The big pink came to the surface and there is always that feeling of relief when it is in the net and hauled aboard.  Let’s just say the smile on Adam’s face says it all.

After the euphoria and photos, the reality of the lost combo set in.  It seems Bryan may have an issue with “donating” to the ocean as we were told the story of his wedding ring going the same way!  We were only in 9m of water so a dive might be on the cards for tomorrow.

We kept fishing for a while with Adam hooking up again to something large but I think its coat was grey and the bust off over sand suggested it might have been.  A Wobby and a couple of Port Jacksons and it was time to come in.  At the ramp, the pink measured 83cm and the weight “guesstimate” was 6kg+.  A quality fish in anyone’s books.

Although the bite was slow, we got a really good fish less than 5 minutes from the marina.  The company was great, and I was really glad I asked if Members would like to come along.