Arrived back on friday from a flying visit to Coral Bay.

Travelled up the previous Saturday doing the trip in 11.5 hours, with light traffic and good driving conditions. Had more than a couple of beers with the lads and ended up not that flash for the first day out. Weather whilst there was great, warm, sunny and little wind.

Any fishing in close resulted in getting monstered by a horde of sharks with very few fish making it to the boat. So we ended up fishing wide, 20+nm out in anything from 100 to 270m. Plenty of sharks out wide as well by mostly smaller models being the most annoying, tangling lines and biting off tackle but amongst these were some bigger units up t 7 foot or so. We brought several of these to the boat which was bloody hard work from the deep water.

When we could get away from the sharks we managed to boat good Reds up to 11kgs and plenty of good Goldband up to 6 kgs or so. Also picked up Saddleback Sea Perch, Robbos, Rankins, Pinkies, Tomato Cod and plenty of smallish cobia 8kgs or so. We looked for Rubies but not sure that the sounder had enough grunt to give us enough detail so we gave that away and concentrated in the 160 to 100m depths which seemed to be the most productive with consistent Reds and Goldband until the sharks moved in, then it was time to move.

Gave the electric reels a go in the 150's so as to get used to them for fishing the deep down here. Man do they save some work when pulling up to rebait etc and mostly made light work of whatever we caught out there including the bigger Reds and Goldband. They also did not have that much trouble with 6 foot sharks although I could smell the drag starting to smoke up on them. But when you are pulling up from 150m every 10 minutes or so they were a godsend.

Only took a couple of pics and they are not very good ones at that. Weather was closing in for the weekend so got out at the right time, leaving at 6.30am to drive through fog for the first 40kms for another easy trip home arriving ay 6.00pm

cheers

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