Had a great day off jurien yesterday. Me and the girlfriend pulled into Jurien for 2 days to get some fish and crays In the esky for the next week as we slowly make our way towards exmouth.

Woke up at 630 probably the earliest we ever have in the last 6 months, The boat was already packed and ready  to go so it was just a matter of hooking up and straight to the marina, we pushed in just after the sun rose with a bit of a fresh easterly blowing. The idea for the day was to troll along the 15-20m line from south passage northwards hopefully to hook a tuna a definitely some macks… definitely hopefully… then a dive just out of north passage in the same depth.

We hit the drop off out of south passage about a mile south of seaward ledge and started a bit of a zigzag northwards. We ran a pusher and the trusty old battered 150 scorpion chrome pink. It was quiet travelling for about the first 20 minutes until my old TLD that’s been lacking in action since it was bought screamed to life, finally the sucker got its work out, after the 3 runs, a short fight, plenty of surface circling with me slapping the surface like a man possessed for the one handed gaff job we finally had the first serious fish onboard the new tinny, a nice Mackie probably of around 10-12kg unmeasured though and caught on the scorpion. We had a few pic’s with the fish, dispatched it and then I was left  with me  staring at the meter plus mack and my little 40 litre coleman cooler then back at the mack and started to think maybe we should call the dive, head back and get this thing on ice…

but first to get the woman onto a fish. The team together decided to pull in the pusher as it seemed macks were the call for the day and we swapped it for another scorpion, a deep diver. We motored around over to the same spot we hooked up previously and two minutes into the troll the tld lit up again. Just as I was passing the rod forward to Jac,.. SNAP! zzzzzzzz turned around to see the heavy outfit that had the deep diver hanging by an inch inside a snapped rod holder with line peeling away at a rate of knots, Jac’s fish had come off the TLD so I handed the next  over and she was straight onto the rod holder busting bastard. She’d tell it like a story of triumph and brute strength but all I remember were girly screams and whimpers and her wildly calling out if I have enough line on this reel! Anyway she did a good job and of the 700 meters of line on the reel it had only really pulled out around 40, but she’ll tell it different. Soon enough we had it boatside and for a littler but still decent mack it put up a great little tussle. Now we already had more than enough fish to get us through the next few days so it was a case of a quick tail grab a few more photos and it was speared back over the side.

Then the wind died off and in 15 meters of water we could clearly see the bottom zipping by under us and it was decided, to hell with it we’ll do the dive anyway the fish can wait for another hour under a wet towel. Not far away was the dive site and we were soon washing the Mackie blood spatters off our blood soaked dive gear.

We hit the water like two oversized balls of shark chum and conditions were much better than our last visit to this reef where vis was less than 2 meters. The ground was awesome last time but this time when we could actually see it was amazing. The ground had heaps of ledges and swim thru’s, soft corals everywhere with yellow turret corals the stand out covering most ledges but no crays in sight.

 We swam around for about half an hour and almost got attacked by a cuttlefish that was intrigued with my reg. Next we headed west for the deeper ground that was around 18meters, as soon as we glided down the 4 meter ledge we got buzzed by a school of 3 macks and the broken flat sandy ground away from the drop off was crawling with baldies we counted around 12 some undersize but most were legal. We were down off that bit for around 15minutes and about four times we had macks coming in and checking us out above us at around the 10meter depth. The rest of the dive was just all the usual suspects and then back to the dory. We didn’t see any  dhuies  this time though  and unfortunately no crays.

So yea pretty stoked with our effort today in our little dory, in and out by 10 o’clock, a great dive and two macks from 3 hits in less than half an hour of trolling. Just worried seeing were going north chasing the fishing and diving might just be easier to do the same in Jurien and save the cash.

Next stop were off to check out shark bay for the first time with a lot of fish to eat!