Earlier in the year I told my best mate that I would love to do a trip to DHI and Shark Bay.

So when he gave me call only a few months later to ask if I wanted to come to shark bay with some of his mates I was going to do everything in my power to go, even put a new job on hold.

So after I get off the phone the first thing was to convince the wife but she could see how excited I was and encouraged me to go. So with that sorted it was time to do some shopping for the trip so I PM-ed Big John to see which jigs he recommended and put the order in.

I got my mate to buy me the 1500 pg ocea jigger in Perth as they wouldn't take my order over the phone got the %20 off which put the reel still in the most expensive category I've paid but why not ey.

Order some more 7/0 circles , 80 lb leader and was pretty much ready to go.

Every couple of days my mate and I would speak to each other during the build up to the trip about what we might catch, how good the weather was looking and whether to take 1 or 2 boats.

It got to the point where I just wanted to go into a time capsule and get out to the moment where I would drop a jig onto a school of fish in 45 metres and have a double fold on my new combo. You could say the anticipation was high.
With 2.5 weeks still to go and my flights booked to Perth I through myself into researching for the trip and printing out all the relevant information to the trip.

Watching every video on YouTube on Denham sharkbay and the island itself.

The main things I would focus on were the depth that people were fishing in, the types of rigs and jigs and weights but also thanks to living in Broome the importance of tides.

This kept me busy for a while until I had done all I could do was wait. It even effected my sleep towards the end.

I had booked my flight to land in Perth a week before the drive up so I could source all the bait. I caught plenty of herring, salmon and trout in the Fremantle harbour. I bought old squid head from sea lanes for $5 bucks a kilo in cryovac bags. We also paid $20 a kilo for whole king prawns which make a fantastic whole bait just ask anyone in broome

The night before everything was packed and it was decided to bring one boat which the owner had done all the servicing and maintenance that needed to be done.

The drive up we had 2 cars and we had a great run up with no dramas and the Prado towing had great fuel economy 14.5L/100km

When we were all getting very excited, especially about how flat the bay was looking.

We cooked a feed and my mate and I went down to the local jetty to get some fresh bait. He ended up getting 5 squid quite quickly. We spoke to a couple of locals at the boat ramp who weren't giving much away, except if I was a cop with the amount of questions I was asking. We quickly worked out we were going to have to do it on our own.

Having no marks except for the bent pin I knew the first day was going to be a ‘scouting for spots’ day.

When we got back to the house we had to decide if we were going to Turtle Bay or Steep Point first. With the weather looking exceptional we decided to go to Turtle Bay, even speaking about doing an overnighter but it was quickly ruled out.

Off to bed we were not sure how much anyone slept because you could say we were close to peaking.

The next day the alarms were meant to go off at 6am but I woke up at 6.31 am checked my phone and it said it was blowing 0km/ph. I thought my phone was broken so I ran around the house waking everyone up.

The gear was packed fuelled up, bought ice and got ready to hit the ramp. We were gliding along the bay towards Levian Shoal. We could have gone full throttle but wanted to be sensible with the amount of oil and fuel we burned so we sat at 30 knots easily. The crossing is easy the only way you could get caught out if you had a decent draught and it was low tide.

High tide was going to be at 5pm so I had a good feeling from the turn of the low at 12pm the fishing would fire up so in the mean time we scouted new spots and did some trolling.

We trolled for about 20 minutes and the sounder lit up straight away so we started marking spots and quickly got impatient, set our drift and started bottom bouncing. A couple of Chinaman cod came up and we realised it wasn’t gonna be that easy...

The photos will do the rest of the talking...

Image Upload: