After many outings with my young fella, Jill was keen to try and get herself another KG.  With fresh bait in the pots yesterday, and her desire to get more crayfish (I thought she would be sick of them by now), she talked me into going and checking the pots and taking her fishing this morning – not that it took a lot of persuasion.  Conditions were forecast to be generally light and glass off during the morning.

We got to the ramp just after 6.15am leaving the kids in bed.  An uneventful launch and trip out about 5 miles and we pulled up on the pots.  Set up and get ready to go, got the first rope in, fed it through the winch and as soon as the slack was taken up and there was load the winch failed – bugger.  Too much of an ask to pull the heavily weighted pots from that depth so the exercise was abandoned.  Note – the winch is now fixed as it was only a bad connection thank goodness.

With the time spent tuning the HDS9 yesterday, I thought we may as well find some ledges and give it a go.  Had a good run on the floating pilchard early but alas it was dropped.  Put a bottom bait down and within 10 seconds was hit by something with quite a bit of size.  Hopes were high as it had good fight and the first colour was silver, but hopes were dashed when a 3-4kg Moorwong came on board.  I have got a few of these in the past and my research told me that they were the worst type of neighbor fish so back it went.  I must say the first hour or more was pretty slow with just a few wrasse and parrot with the odd yellow stripy fish.  I am completely convinced that the YSF are the pickers from hell.  Some go pro footage we took a while ago showed that they could strip a bait in seconds with minimal feel on the line.  It was all a little uninspiring and I was disappointed for Jill.

At about 8.15am, it all changed.  I don’t know if it was the tide starting to run or the good concentration of burly that had worked its way to depth but we were now fishing completely different waters.  First my floater went off with a solid fish that I called for a pup sambo.  Wrong, a nice 3.75kg Dhu came to the boat.  Jill then hooked something that wasn’t a wrasse or parrot and she landed a fighting skippy - I love it when the schools of skippy move it as it seems to stir everything up.  Next was Jill reeling in a small wrasse that all of a sudden got “upgraded” and she had her first experience of the little Ci4+ 4000 screaming with a big sambo on the end.  It spat it and the quite damaged wrasse was sent straight back on a floating rig with hooks in it.

It was then that Jill hooked up solid.  This was a nice fish and my only part in it was telling her to trust the gear, keep positive pressure on the fish and be gentle.  I called it for a sambo as it had nice strong runs and she did a really good job with it over 10 minutes or so.  It was almost disbelief when the 7kg Dhu came to the boat but it was an awesome capture on light gear and a credit to her fishing ability to land it.

No sooner had we got it on the boat then the floater went off again.  I struggled to pull the rod out of the holder given the power of the fish and handed it to Jill so she could feel the pull of the sambo.  She did well again and boated a 3.5kg pup, with lots of big followers, and I was imagining the next hour of arm stretching on big angry fish.  Jill commented on just how hard those sambos pulled as one half the size went harder than the Dhu.  With so much action and happiness, it was unfortunate our day was finished in an instant!

With all the action and just having landed her first sambo too, Jill went back to her seat and stood on a whiting hook that the young one had left on the floor – grrr.  It went in past the barb and Jill didn’t take well to my “it’s only a small hook and not too deep, let me get it with the plyers”.  So, we headed in so the doctor could cut it out.

Back at the ramp about 9.15am with nearly 11kg of Dhu was certainly not what we expected.  A few quality hours and an experience we will always remember – for both good and bad reasons, but mostly good.

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