For a number of reasons I had to come east last week. Being the weather fanatic that I have become (must have something to do with currently living in the “windy city”), I was checking the Brisbane Bar wind forecast constantly, even before I left!  What do you know, Sunday morning looked the goods so a few days of texts and discussions with my old mate Mal, who by the way is a quality fisherman, set the trip up.

Over the past year or more I have sent a lot of photos to the mates over east with some of our awesome WA captures.  Mal is the only one that has replied, other than those with expletives, sharing photos of his captures.  Without doubt, Mal’s northern Moreton Island, and Brisbane River lizard work, is quality and I wanted to go there and fish the island ground with him and this was an opportunity too good to pass up.

Of course there are always the good intentions of getting up very early fighting fit.  Somehow that went to the dogs (well the fighting fit part) over a fairly long night swapping stories and sharing quite a few cold ones – bloody Brisbane humidity.  I did detect that Mal was a little apprehensive as last time we came to Brisbane we fished the river for a big fat zero and I’m sure he didn’t want that to happen again.  Anyway, off to bed much later than planned and at the 3am wake up I was a little worse for wear.

What a mission.  I definitely felt spoiled living at Sorrento and fishing nearshore out of Hillarys where it is “house to lines in the water” within half an hour on most days.  This trip however had a one and a quarter hour drive to the Spinnaker Sound boat ramp near Bribie Island, boat launching and about an hour to the spot north of Moreton Island.  Nevertheless, we got to the grounds about 6am, with the high tide forecast about 8.30am.  And, the weather was nice and the wind was light.

I think we fished an area called the Freeman Channel, but I don’t really know.  It was interesting though as the depth was about ten metres and you could see the bottom.  It was clearly reefy/rubbly ground where the water filling and emptying Moreton Bay created quite a current and prohibited the bottom filling up with sand.  Anticipation was fairly high as I had seen the fish photos from this area before.

I was pleased to see the rigs Mal had were virtually identical to the floater that I use in Perth.  Lightly weighted double snelled terminal, 2+ metres of wind on to 30lb braid spooled to a baitrunner on an Ugly Stick.  He certainly has a rod and reel collection and the Stella (which must be hidden from the better half) came along too, amongst a few others.  The good old faithful baits as well – whole pilchards and whole squid with plenty of burley for when the current dropped and we could anchor.

Off we go.  The trick here was to cast your lightly weighted whole bait up current and wide and let the natural drift help you position the offering, and retrieve when you were “dragging it”.  With the rate we were travelling in the current, a soft plastic out the back needed nothing other than to be towed along.  Within a couple of minutes Tim-o (no not the one we all know) had a nice sweetlip in the boat.

The next few hours were awesome as we landed quite a lot of nice fish.  One of the changes we had to make was to have at least one gang out there as the mackies made short work of the mono and we lost quite a few.  We also had good success on the high tide when the current slowed and we could anchor and burley – mayhem as all rods were going off at the same time.  We happily fished away and at least were getting some fish in every drift we had.  Mal was clearly showing me what a quality fisherman he is as well by picking up a number of pinkies/sweeties on the plastic, and every other bait he had out.

The young one was starting to get sick of it all by about 10am so we had to come in (after a few more “last drift” calls however, much to his dismay – and ours as we left them biting).  All in all we got a really nice bag, a long way from home.

I must say I really enjoyed fishing with Mal and Tim-o - nice to see masters on their own turf.  The one thing that struck me was the different size and bag limits because if we were fishing in WA, not many fish would have come home.  We don’t make the rules however and Mal has plenty of hungry mouths to feed so nothing went to waste.  I think I would rather keep two big pinkies than a bunch of smaller ones if “push came to shove” though.

Am hoping for light winds on my return to the west this weekend but it doesn’t look good.

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