After much talk of one day getting a couple of trailer boats up to the Abrolhos, we decided the time had come and locked in a few dates to get out and have a go.

The plan was to go with 4 guys (me, Wydra, Wen and JoRn) on 2 boats and spend 2 nights out at the islands. We locked in a series of weekends, but got to the last of those weekends (last weekend) which was the last weekend of cray season and the forecast was pretty average. Swell was 3.2-3.8m the whole time and a bit of wind to go with it. Despite that we made the last minute call to get out there and have a go rather than wait until March for the Abrolhos cray season to open up again.

We met at 3am on Thursday and drove up to Gero. Thankfully the weather gods smiled on us the first day, and we had a good run over to the islands using less fuel than expected.

We set our cray pots to make some deck space, then went for a fish. We were fishing a mix of plastics and metals (no bait rule on both boats!) but found the fishing a bit slow on our boat at first. Some undersized trout and a few other bits and pieces. John's boat picked up an 82cm dhuie and a nice trout, but at the time we were about to head to anchor our boat still had an empty esky. Thankfully we managed to pick up a few redemption trout at a shallow spot on the way to anchor, with two around the 62cm mark and one smaller.

Unfortunately I snagged up at this spot, so I donned the mask and fins and dove down to retrieve the lure - the swirl in the water is me, not a fish!

Smallest jigged trout of the trip - greedy bugger

At anchor for the night having a barbie including some salt and pepper squid made from a couple of squid John pulled.

After many wines and much talk by me of how there were probably fish all around our anchorage, I was goaded into tying on a plastic and having a few casts. I was using a new rod that had yet to be blooded (Yamaga Blue Sniper 77/3 with Stella 5000SW and PE3). After about 3 minutes in the water I got buried in the rocks by something, so quickly found some motivation to fish more. What followed was a really awesome shallow water (9m) snapper session. I think we boated 13 or 15 of the things, all sized, but no monsters. All taken on plastic, and it didnt seem to matter what kind of plastic you threw out there.

At around 11pm or so after having been up since 2am and going pretty hard on the red vino I was about to call it a night, when I got a hit that was much more substantial than the others. After a lengthy fight that featured much swearing and fear that either my new rod would snap or the fish would get me around the anchor rope, up surfaced my PB cobia. A quick pic and he was back to fight another day.

After that it was time to call it a night, so we got a small amount of sleep and woke up with a solid hangover to go and haul the cray pots. Unfortunately the Abrolhos stories of people hauling 20 crays out of one pot didn't come true for us, with us pulling only 11 out of the 4 pots.

We had hoped we could bolster our cray numbers with some diving, so we grabbed the dive gear and hopped in on a likely looking hill that came up from 15m or so right up to the surface. The bottom was covered in Staghorn coral and we didn't see a single cray, so after 15mins or so we decided to relocate. We found another spot in about 6 or 7m that had plate coral all over the ground and we thought we were in for a win. Down we went and there were trout, baldies and dhuies everywhere, but after searching high and low and not seeing a single whisker, we decided to accept our failure and go for another fish.

Both boats did well this day, picking up a range of fish including trout, a makkie on our boat, some snapper, red throat and some other bits and pieces.

The second night while we were filleting the fish, I saw a big shark out of the corner of my eye. The next couple of hours were crazy for sharks, with some smaller models as well as at least 3 HUGE tigers milling around in the spotties at the back of the boat. We had 3 attempts at tackling with these guys, but all ended in tears, and with our supply of shark rigs depleted we called it quits. Not sure whether it was because of the sharks or not, but despite me putting in a lot of casts, we didn't get a single fish that night (just some squid). That night the wind really whipped up around midnight, so we were out there hauling anchor and moving one of the boats so they wouldn't bang together, and almost no sleep was had by most that night.

The next morning was even worse for crays, with only 2 keepers out of the 4 pots, so we decided to have one last fish and then head for home. John's boat had a great session with heaps of pinkies and trout jigged including this double header of pinkie and trout on jig by John.

I had a good session that last morning also, landing a heap of trout including trout of the trip at 72cm and a 60cm dhuie.

The way back in was a hell of a lot rougher than the ride out with the wind having whipped up, taking more than double as long and well over double the fuel (we were pretty close to not making it back on the fuel!) but the slow travelling speed at least meant we could get a couple of lures out the back. We boated another shark makkie and a decent sized tuna, before having both of our wire traces snipped through by suspected wahoo.

All in all it was a good first trip with some lessons learned for the next one. We have an idea how to find the good fish over there now, but just have to figure out the crays! Unfortunately 9 months to wait for the crays, but reckon there'll be a pre-demersal ban fishing trip getting squeezed in sometime soon.

Dan

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