I've been getting into a bit of boat fishing with my brother in-law George over the last month. We've done three trips out with the first two being pretty good. We decided that we'd head out to Rottnest island nice and early in the morning.
We've decided to try a bit of trolling for something different to our usual fishing methods of baitfishing. Its been fairly successful too. on our first trip we tried out near Rottnest and fairly close to the island too and gradually moved further out.

All of a sudden my line started screaming off at what seemed like a hundred miles an hour, shocking us all back to reality. Whoo hoo I was on and we weren’t anywhere near the west end yet. The others quickly wound their lines in out of the way and I settled into fighting this thing, no idea what it was yet. I was quite excited and we were all guessing at what it could be. After about twenty minutes or so I knew it was quite big, and it still wasn’t tiring much though it came fairly close to the boat a few times then took off again in different directions. A couple of times it went down to the bottom then came back up to the surface so quick we thought it was going to jump, but it didn’t. After another ten minutes we got a look at it and realized it was a mako shark, I certainly was glad I was using wire trace now. I can’t remember how many times all up that I got it alongside the boat, then it would take off again but eventually we had it along the side of the boat and at first the others didn’t want it on board. “I have to have a photo with it at least” I said, so I passed the rod to my brother in-law, did the gaffing and bringing on board myself through the rear door. You beauty photo time, my first game fish caught in the metro area. Considering how aggressive these sharks can be, we dispatched it pretty quickly and put it in the esky on ice. I quite enjoy eating shark and definitely wanted to try this one. Also we tried some bottom fishing a bit later and managed a feed of other fish as well, with a small jewie a couple of cm over legal size and a few nice skippy too. So a pretty good trip all round.

Danny.