Well, the trip was great! I can't say I have been to any place like the Monte's before, it is so full of promise that you could spend months out there and only scratch the surface.

As I have said in earlier posts the water temp virtually switched off the trolling action completely. The absence of all bird life was kind of strange, given that you would expect the place to be alive with baitballs, tuna and mackies.

Despite our bad luck with the pelagics we still managed a couple of nice fish, which will feature in subsequent FWA articles. Aside from the lack of billfish, we made up for it with some of the best quality bottom fishing you could ever wish for. I forget the species count, but it was right up there. No small fish and no inedible fish, except for one Norwest Blowie someone pulled in to riotous laughter from the rest of the crew.

Day one was spent trolling over there and accounted for a nice Mackie and a couple of Dollies. Day two and we hit Archiong Island , where Nathan scored a massive GT even before I had managed to set foot in the zodiac to get over to the island. Unfortunately I didn't get any footage of him fighting the fish, but the pics are awesome.

Archong was definataly a highlight for me, as Andrew (the senior deckie), Mark and myself had an absolute ball chucking poppers at hundreds of Goldspots and bludgers that were harassing bait in the shallows.

We did some more bottom fishing in the arvo and moved camp to pick up the dingy that evening.

Tuesday saw us head wide as the weather was perfect for a night broadbill fish. Bernie had scored one the trip previously and we carefully planned the trip to try and replicate that. We headed out wide trolling all the way and spend most of the day trolling "BIG Baits" for Big Marlin, ( I have some good video of how Bernie rigs his trolling baits) but as mentioned before the water was shut down at 31 degrees. To break up the day we stoppped at a spot where Bernie promised us a couple of Ruby Snapper. An absolutely georgeous fish, that has been fished commercially before but rarely caught by rec anglers. They grow to 18 kilo's and look awesome. (You will need to check out the FWA article when it comes out to see what I mean.) We picked up one each and then headed out wide for the night.

Most went to bed early but I stayed up with Andrew and Tom to catch squid for broardbill bait. Believe it or not we had a 60 - 80kg marlin freejump over the marlin board at the back of the boat chasing a baitfish at about 1.00 am. It lit up electric blue as it porpoised over the corner of the boat. I was gobsmacked and so was Andrew. Unfortunately we were the only ones awake when it happened.

The next day we moved to the calm cyclone mooring to check it out (just in case) and ended up splitting up with some going mud crabbing, and me, Andrew, Mark  and Nathan popper chucking around the area instead. I nailed a big cobia, which spat the hooks after a few minutes, but all other fish were few and far between.

We played around in the dingies the next day while a few of the boys went diving, that's when I nailed a big Spanglie on one of those Gulp Crabs and that little GT, plus a heap of other trevs on various poppers.

 There is plenty of more things to report and heaps of video footage that I will get to cut together sometime soon.

I hope you will all forgive me for the briefness of the report at this stage as I am very busy at work and also need to write several articles for the magazine.

To give you an idea I took over 600 photos and truckloads of footage. So once I know what pics will be in the mag, a lot more will be put up on fishwrecked.

Cheers

Andy Mac