Quick run out Thursday morning. Weather conditions pleasant. Plenty of fish around. Grabbed our bag limit, and headed home with the fish still biting strongly. Unfortunately one of the larger dhufish couldn't be released, so we had to keep him. Some pics below:

 It's been ages since being able to get out for a fish. But yesterday the weather held up nicely and we got amongst a few fish. Nothing huge but a good feed. 

We got out to 42 m and there were a few shows on the sounder, so set an exploratory drift. My brother in law has decided to get on board jigging for demersals and bought a new slow jigging rod and a handful of jigs. So today was the day to try it out. Anyway I go to the front of the boat and Doug sets himself down the back with his new rod but he still chucks out his bait rod. I hooked up pretty quickly but dropped it. Then Dougs bait rod takes off and he's onto something with a bit of pull. Then his jig rod doubles over, so what to do, quickly wind mine up and get stuck into what's on his new set up. It turned out Doug got a dirty big Sambo and me this nice Pinky 

Had a good laugh about that all day. He didn't have to wait long though as the fish were on the chew especially on the artificials. Doug got this nice little Dhu on the jig.

All in all was a great day on the water, a few nice feeds and plenty of laughs. Hopefully not this long to wait till our next trip  

Weekend Fun - Pics Below.

 Arvo run with Bodie, Daz (DazSamFishing), Den and Scano for a jig. Bit bumpy but the Reg loved it. 

Headed out to where we got the dhuies 2 weeks ago, they were still there. 

Nice 75 cm to Scano. 

Huge Sharkie on jig to Daz

Solid 94 cm Dhu to me. 

And a different shot, just for Captain Grumpy :)

 Gents

We are looking for an airmar B260/B265 fairing (the big blue one), lookoimng to make a mould out of it. Hence, does not need to be in good shape. 

Anyone got one the want to sell or donate?

 Took my partners boy out lastnight in hope to get a feed of cobbler, we managed to get our bag in half hour. He was stoked with the results!

Good night in the Sound. Biggest 91cm. Carl was struggling to lift them...

Been a while since ive been able to get out for a fish with work being pretty busy, and lost a bit of mojo on the fishing front lately, howevever managed to get a couple trips out over the last 2 weeks. Been struggling with deckies being unavailable or out on other boats so solo runs it was...time to blood some new deckies i think!!

Do get some strange looks and comments at the ramp when trying to launch and retrieve a 26ft boat on your own!

Went out early Saturday with the light winds, nice morning on the water. Ended up about 14nm out of Mindarie on some older spots, only to find someone had beaten me to the punch and fishing very close by. Kept on moving past them as its not kosha to fish too close. Found a bit more ground another mile or so away and had a fish, first drop on the money with a nice 50+cm baldie coming ove the side. Good start!

Kept moving around a bit being plagued with rat pinks on jig and bait everywher ei went, must have caught 20+ of them. Came acros another piece of coral and looked the goods, i could see some big fish sitting well up and knew they would be sambos. First drop with the KG rig resulted in an instant hookup, but was not thinking KG, then up popped one of the fattest and longest KG's ive seen in some time, going 59cm on the ruler!!!

Couldnt get another KG off the spot so dropped down a jig, only to hook up on a suspected sgt baker.. then nec minute monstered by a Sombo I'd seen earlier.. this happened 4 times and on my little PE 1.2 gear didnt stand a chance! Time to move on 4 jigs lighter.

Couldnt find a dhu to save myself and was time to head in, so thought I'd push back in and see if the boat and left the spot i wanted to try at the start of the day and it had. I had a baited rod ready and my jig and thought, last drop, drop them both over... jig jig and im on, nice fish knew it was a dhu, only to look at the rod in the corner starting to load up... thought up the fish on the jig first and if a keeper i will keep and let whatever is on the bait rod go. Always the way, cant find one all day then bang, Both released strong, no release weight required

The result! Home by 12.30 or so, cleaned up and cooked the wife fresh KG and chips for dinner, needless to say she was suitably impressed!

A bit of Mojo back, Leeman next!

 Had our clubs comp bluewater comp over the weekend. Got plenty of fish that wasn't on the list but was a great weekend. Find out how we did next weekend but unfortunately i wont be there as i go back to work tommorrow. 

The highlight was when a 40kg cobia and a spanish mackeral were circling a floating spanish flag and then a sailfish came through and hung around the boat. Something i wont forget anytime soon!

Also broke my spirit!

Bro and I headed outa Mindarie at 11am Saturday and headed to a coral patch in the 40s and drifted some promising sounder action for a 47cm snapper and a scorpion fish on a jig! Few other boats were in the vicinity and they knicked off so we called it and headed to the bank where it raises up to 30m.

Didn't see a thing for miles but then started seeing floats and a few other boats so begun to sound around and we were getting pretty excited and pulled in a 33cm Blackarse but the bite was terrible and I reckon I had two half decent hits all day.

Called it a day and 'one more drift' and chucked a cuttlefish tentacle on my drift bait rig and started cleaning up throwing the bait in the water and my rod buckled over. Brought up a size pinkie with my bros line wrapped around my rig so he grabbed the gaff and as he reached out his line got snagged on the bottom and his braid sheered through my 30lb line and we watched in horror as the luckiest snapper on the bank swam away.

All up we did about 45 miles over 5.5 hours for one Blackarse but at least the 19 mile trip home was pleasant sitting on 28kn the whole way.

If anyone wants to offer some advice on the ground I was hitting I'll be all ears.

 Couple from recent trips, gotta love it when the blues pop up!

 Headed out at lunchtime on Saturday, me, Den, TimVB and Scano. 

Charged out to the bank, but by 4.30 pm had not cauht a fish and it was looking grim with almost nothing on the sounder all day.......

Then we sounded a nice bit of low reef with some great arches hovering 5 m up.......all 4 of us hooked up immediately......finally!

Tim dropped his and Dens hooks broke, me and Scano landed ours, me on PE2 jig and Scano on PE1 jig, a bloody good effort on the noodle stick. 

Two dhuies on board, job done and likely only dhuies down there so not wanting to have to risk cathing another dhu we packed uo, cracked a few beers and headed home at 38 knots   

 Out of Bunno in the 40's, squid on 8/0 circle. Few whales around so heads up while your travelling fella's. Sorry about the upside pic, f#cked if I can get it right way up, was a nice dhu anyway. While I'm at it a pic of the new rig.

 Big girl arroved from Carolina yesterday......

Unwrapping her.

Carlolina flair!

 6 hunjy horsepower

 Got her wet......AMAZING BOAT!

 Some pictures from the last few inshore fishing sessions this year, been chasing pinkies but haven’t found many. You can’t complain about the by catch tho!

Pulled hooks on two before bagging this pair tonight.

New assassin Beachmaster Zero, 50lb grinder braid and fresh mullet from Shore Catch

Well the weather this year looked atrocious worst in at least 5 years for our annual trip. Wind Wind..followed with 3-4m swells for the entire time. But...we made do in the 7 days we were there. North passage it was for every trip out.
We had about 3 days out there, with a terrible half day. Considering we did.....ok...
Days we couldn't get out, we spent collected big occys from exposed reefs and eating the local pastries, followed by lots of drinking beer and wine. (not necessarily in that order)

No massive reds (10+kg) this year (4-8kg), but found some awesome untouched ground in 100m that held your normal offenders in numbers....Out deep we did our normal annual efforts of bagging out on massive greyband and some average sized rubies, which always a specticle at filleting table. Biggest GB went 26.5kg. 

We did notice, due to what i suspect caused by large swells, a clear colour change in about 80-90m (~15km out), and would explain why it was hard to tempt stuff below these depths. Normal for us to find big reds in 60m and loads of fish. Each mark this year was very....short on life to say these least, until you sucked it up and headed out into those ugly winds and chop past that colour change. 

Sharks were normal, nothing over the top on most of our spots maybe lost half a dozen fish in the days we went out. Until we tried trolling that regular visited place at the back of the reef. Those things are smarter each year. Managed to get 1 of 2 10kg+ mack under the boat before we gave up, the other lasted 2 secs on the lure before it was blasted by big whalers. Better weather and would have liked to have gone North or South of entrances, so no macks were landed this year. 

A fun video we made from occying. youtu.be/GSNI4T3bdxw
Context: I'm trying to pluck one from a hole and your mate just picks a big one off rocks with bare hands. 

I'll upload some awesome drone footage from the shoreline at a later date, when i have a free wifi connection someplace. (Follow the my youtube channel for updates)

 A couple of undersize snapps put back but good a good feed of sandies and a KGW with my young bloke this afternoon. More than enough for us, we left them bitting. So nice to get back on the water 

 All done and dusted for another year. Just finishing up the cleanup after getting home late Sunday. Weather was mostly good, after missing a lot of the first 5 days due to a passing front. Fish had been good prior to our arrival, and were still around for a while, then, bang, one day the water went cold and green, just like it was in Kalbarri all summer, and the pelagics fled.  Really hard going for a while; we actually went four days without losing a lure, as there were f*all fish to take them and then to be taken by sharks. We managed a feed of demersals by working hard at it, but the billfish, Wahoo, Spaniards and even the bloody YFT were gone.Nothing left but ocean cockroaches, AKA Stripeys.

This year was going to see a big effort on the bills out wider--our very first foray , and only a brief one, saw us 2 from three on nice little blacks. way to christen the new rig, which had only had a total of three trips out of home before it was loaded up for the trip north.

Sails were about at first, but we weren't adapting very well to using outriggers for the first time--we usedto run straight off the rod tip, and free spool the monent one turned up. We worked it out in the end, and had a best day of four released, but lost a hell of a lot more than we landed--bill-wrapped leader ( 80lb and 120lb) bustoffs were especially common, but we were using exactly the same gear as previous years when it wasn't really an issue, so ??? We even hooked one on an X-Rap 20, and got it nearly to the boat.

Wahoo seemed to be around in better numbers than previously, apart from the cold, green episode, our best day was 3 and we weren't even targeting them, bycatch to sails, mostly.

Spaniards were about at first, then went quiet, but there were some good fish among them.

The sharks got what was probably the best one--the head and shoulders that were left covered the bottom of a full-sized fish bin

we managed the usual quality demersals, but not as many as last year, sharks make it very hard, and you just give up rather than feed them quality fish.

There were a few of the smelly, bitey buggers around this year--no, not sharks, big barracuda.

This lure had the unparellelled distinction of surviving nearly the whole trip, and ended up looking a lot worse than it does in this pic--it accounted for
5 wahoo, three YFT, 2 spaniards, plus a sharked YFT and spaniard--then was snipped off by a 'hoo where the line cut the water, late in the trip.

Lots of beautiful evenings, sundowners on the beach

Been a bit slack with this years report from May but will give overview;

- weather was up their with the best! fished 7 of 9 days, could have been 8 but were too rooted!

- water temp plus 27oC!! past experience told us this isnt good

- got just under 20kg each but had to work as hard as ever for them

- no great stress though as better than sitting on shore

- sharks were not too much of problem, maybe lost 6 fish all trip

- fished anywhere from 60m to 200m, from well south, to well north

- had the new HDS Carbon fitted for the trip with 1kW transducer

- worked well but to be honest up to 100m didnt show much different (albeit greater clarity) than my 10yo Navman 4500

- reds were hard to find, only 6 whole trip and normally would average that per day

- caught a nice sail in 60m on bottom rig 

- few squid thrown in 

- all in all beer was cold, caught some fish, had the pleasure of seeing Helen (who contrary to what she says was misbehaving badly!) and had a great trip! 

 Any reports of the snapper being caught in the sound yet? Starting to come to that time of year!!

Hit the water late today after seeing that today was probably the only one with "good enough" conditions for the next week. Launched at gentlemens  hours from the club and shot across the Sound in near perfect conditions but as I reached the channel I quickly saw that the swell was much bigger than forecast with one set almost closing out the channel. Choosing a wider approach got through with no trouble and headed out to the high 40's where I have been doing well of late. 48 metres was biteless but I had noted some good fish shows in the low 40's so headed back in to that area.....yup still there!

Dropped three baits and hooked up almost immediately, the head shakes and surging runs were typical of good snapper but within moments of hook up the runs stopped to be replaced by the screaming run of a shark which surfaced quickly exploding on the surface before breaking me off on the sea anchor. Second rid goes off, same result, they were just taking a bit of the fish they were swallowing whole.  Two to the tax man

rerigged .....two more hook ups and two more donations ......stuff wasting good snapper, gave it away and came home fishless. Now I have NEVER lost a fish to a shark in the metro area before but four fish in less than an hour is ridiculous........can we now expect this to be the norm?

Recently myself and my brother have teamed up with Daiwa and we got a heap of new reels for us to use off the rocks. Pretty excited to use them this is the mayhem that happened on their first outing and my Dogfight 8000 certainly got christened with a monster of a fish!

The plan for the day was to film a bit of slide baiting for sambos and King’s and a video we are making on it about chasing them off the rocks. My mrs also came with and she has been wanting to land a good fish for a while now and after her last outing loosing 2 good dhufish and a big sambo off the rocks in one session she was out to redeem herself. We set up my Maven with the Dogfight on it, 200lb leader and 100lb braid. Out goes the first herring and it was her turn first when it went off. Short wait and the rod is screaming in the rod holder. She gets to it and I’ve tightened the drag until I though there was enough and the rod was pretty loaded. Straight into the reef and busted off pe10. Far out that was a big fish!!

Another live herring was sent out after a quick re rig on the same gear but this time a much longer wait. The rod screamed off again and I’ve ran to it and tightened the drag until I was starting to get pulled off my feet and this fish didn’t slow down and ran very fast to my right before a big set has smashed my line and got it tangled onto a bommie about 10m from me. I backed off the drag and let this fish drag 100 odd meters of line through the reef while seeing my line tangled on weed on top of a rock. For 15 minutes I went back and forth with the fish taking line and me slowing and gently pulling this fish back through my line tangled on the rocks. Eventually it came free and I’ve raced to wind up all the slack line. Thinking I had lost it I’ve finally came tight again but the fish was a long long way to my left almost back in front of where I originally hooked it. I’ve put a lot of pressure back on and up popped a huge sambo! Bit of forced direction changes and I had the fish ready to wash into a crack and try leader it up. As the fish came around a large wave has lifted the fish and cut my slide leader off on a barnacle. The fish got picked up and slammed into the crack I was planning on landing it in but no longer connected to anything. I’ve freaked out and grabbed the gaff and somehow managed to get to it before another wave came. Feeling pretty bad about having to gaff the fish to get it up when I wanted to release it, but after the fight and getting trashed on the rocks it was in bad shape anyway. I decided that even though it was a shame to have to keep it I couldn’t let it go to waste so I’ve cut the fillets off and I ended up carrying them out on the hour walk to the car. It made for a painful walk back but it will be eaten, used as bait and burley so it won’t be wasted. This fish is my my second best landbased and made my 105cm Brag Matt look tiny, had to be 30-33kg and what a fish to christen the brand new Dogfight on its first outing!!

Hi all,

Belated report, as I did this early May, but thought I would post in case others considering similar.

I booked a 3 day charter with Whitey on Evolution Fishing Charters to the Abrolhos. He leaves from Kalbarri, and fishes mainly the northern groups, and the advantage of him over others is that it is what I would call a "luxury boat" with only 4 customers on board. You leave early on one day, travel and fish that day, then full day next, then fish and return about 3pm the next day.

I fell in love with Kalbarri - beautiful place I hadn't visited for a bit, and brought the family up for a holiday the next week. Accomodation was cheap too, and good food and family activities.

Anyway the fishing. The truth is was it blew 20 plus knots most of the time. However we landed about 160+ quality fish between the 4 of us in 3 days. The skipper was on the ball (and the decky) and if it got quiet we moved. The negative is we couldn't do much jigging or deep drop due to the wind.

We caught red emperor, coral trout, baldies galore, dhufish, snapper and other emperor, with little interference from sharks, plus a few amberjack, sambos and a few tuna (no mackeral). 

Even at mooring we landed 60 cm fish on the herring gear - good giggles. Meals were great, and as the customers were me, my father in law, best mate and his dad - we had a blast. Mate's dad had never caught a decent boat fish so lots of bucket lists ticked off for him. Leather couches to snooze on in transit and comfy bunk beds and a shower made it comfortable.

We had plenty of fillets to keep, but realeased the majority of fish. It was a super experience, which could only be improved if the wind was lower, but that is always our problem , and we still caught fish. 

The boat is a 15.6m luxury game fishing boat - and they are equipped with high quality gear - top shelf trolling gear, and reels were Penn Slammer IIIs I think which were actually great. No need to bring a thing - all jigs/ plastics provided too which is nice, but sadly we didn't get to use them as much as we could have.

Price was about $1800 or so each I think.

Few pics attached. 

Hey guys,

Just got back from an awesome trip upto Tamala Station. Had to pull the kids out of school on the Tuesday arvo to get a spot at Shell Beach, Tamala.

We left Mandurah at around 2:30am Wednesday and started setting up camp at 2pm Wed. 

Got out fishing on our first day at the leisurely time of 10 am. Was a bit quiet at our first spot, so decided to head towards Salutation Island, on the way over our sounder flashed red. A quick U turn had the sounder lit up red. I didn't even get a chance to get a line in the water, as Scott and Mum were hooked up solid straight away. Jade got some action video and I was either baiting hooks, taking Snapper off or netting another Snapper. Great fun, we had our limit of 6 Pinkies (No license for Jade) in about 45 min. 

The next day was a carbon copy. Except for the Dolphins. They go to any boats fishing, and wait for any undersize fish (Pinky's) as soon as you have unhooked them, they wait until you throw them over and get an easy feed. I even tried slipping them quietly in, but they were onto it. Saying that we didn't lose one fish to sharks. Which at the moment is unpresendented(spelling) Only got 3 sized Snapper that day. My boy, Scott, blamed it on the bloody Dolphins. His sister, Jade was pretty chuffed though and got some cool video's of them.

Our Third day got Scott his biggest snapper to date. It went 720mm. It didn't seem too big to start with, but then sent him on a merry dance around the boat. Jade also decided to have a crack. I hooked her up and she managed the fish above. We got a heap of Pinky's but nothing else (not complaining) but would love to get a few Blue Bone, seen heaps of undersize ones.

Just a p.s. We recently lost our beautiful Red Heeler Yani, 

We got this little dude 2 weeks before heading up there. Meet Rusty, he had a ball. 

 Just got back from my 3 week swing from Cone bay and got the chance to fish with someone from the fishing club I am in. HARD to find deckies midweek for a fish. Fish were slow to come onto the chew to start with but as that sun got lower to the water and the tids turned fish started coming into the boat. Landed the first trout for his boat and the first just legal red emperor. Got a good bag of decent blueline too. 

Arriving back in Perth on Friday night after a couple of days on site I decided to check whether there was a slight chance for good weather during the weekend.  To my "shock" Saturday was showing up as a relatively good day with a small swell and mild winds.  I say "shock" as for most of this year the weather has been downright awful during the weekends - the only time that we have to get out on the water.  Knowing that my preparation for an outing takes at least three hours, Gail and I made a call to launch sometime during the late morning on Saturday.  Willyweather also indicated that the wind would be dropping off toward the afternoon.

The next morning it did not take too long to set up the fishing gear, tie traces, check the boat, set-up the GoPros, refuel and buy bait.  After all the necessary pre-work we made our way to Woodman Point and by 11:00 were on the water heading off to Rotto.  It took about an hour to get to our favourite area and after confirming some serious arcs on the Raymarine we dropped the pick.  It was only after I dropped the anchor that I realised that there was a substantial current pushing through, so much so that the marine exclusion zone marker in the distance was leaning over to a point of being almost horizontal to the water.  This did not put us off as we had caught some good fish in these conditions in the past.  My understanding of these conditions is that the smaller fish find it difficult to hang around in the heavier current and therefore the bigger fish are more available - my theory anyway.

We introduced generous amounts of burley into the swim and after an hour Gail landed the first fish of the day - a small shark which was not really on our target list.  Half an hour later I landed a snapper of 71cm and as I was fighting the fish Gail hooked into the second snapper which ended up measuring 76cm.  For the next two and a half hours we landed a further two sharks (one of about 1.5m), Gail a good pinkie of 81cm and my top fish of the day - a YTK stretching the tape to 107cm.  During this time we were reefed no less than five times by what I believe were larger YTKs.  I introduced the heavier gear (50lb mono) which did not even get a glance.  Goes to show that lighter gear gets the better hook ups most of the time.  By 16:00 we decided to call it a day as we made our way back before we lost the light for the day.

The highlight of the day for Gail and I was seeing whales breaching and even having one pop up close to the boat to say hello.  Another day in Perth Paradise.

YouTube

https://youtu.be/dcfwKsgUhQI

 Heading up Ningaloo on Friday just wondering if anyone has been their in the last couple of months and have any reports of the sharks and what they are like at the moment, Only have 3 weeks this time so I wanna try get some fish without the tax man taking half of it! 

 Thought i put this up as its pretty much up there with best sesh have had. After not catching much in Perth for a while decided to head up north for few days with the mrs in search for a nice gutter to sit at an soak some baits and hopefully pull a mulla out of. Arrived at the beach an checked up an down for over an hour  till found nice spot to setup. First cast on the small gear an mrs was pulling in dart straight up for half hour then the bites stoped for a bit an the big baits started gettin hit an tailor were round. Pulled in a bag of them  up untill the  sun started setting then the mullaz were out. Virtually dead on the sun touching the  water first big rod went of after after few minute fight come up one bout a metre long. After few photos an putting back i set rod up again just put in rod holder it goes of  mrs turn an she pulls in another smaller model tgis time. Next 20 minutes was few bites and runs but all missing the hooks till rod buckled over an set the hooks after a 10 minute fight i pulled one at  1.2m long.The next 45 minutes we were geting bites but no runs an pulled in a few wobbygons. Mrs decided to go bed an not even 10 minutes after reel started screaming an hooked on for bout a minute till leader broke. As i just reset that rod out my other one goes of after yelling out to the mrs so  she could pull in it but was fast asleep i had 15 minute fight up comes one at 1.3m after few photos an couple minutes of trying to get it to swim of it went of well. Fished for bout  30 mins an  the pickers were out so decide call it a night an get up early an that resulted in 2 more mullaz bout the 70cm mark. All mullaz were realeased to catch another day.

Scored some epic weather back in late April for our annual Abrolhos trip. We normally launch at Gregory and stay at Wallabi group but this trip left from Gero with the plan of exploring/ fishing Palsaert, Easter and hopefully getting back up to Wallabi weather permitting. With the weather being so good it wasnt a problem and we ended up going around the Western side of Palsaert up through Easter before doing a full lap of Wallabi and heading back to Gero. Spent two nights on the pick at Morley Island anchorage which is awesome and were offered a mooring in the lagoon at Pigeon for our night up at Wallabi. We carry 670L under the floor and had 93L left when we arrived back at the ramp at Gero. Travelled 218nm in total averaging about 2.65L/nm for the trip. 

Fishing was good without being unbeleivable and we almost managed our 10kg each of Dhufish, Trout, Spangles and Baldies. Besides one small Tuna couldnt get amongst the pelagics despite coming across heaps of bait and birds. Lost a lot of good fish to sharks too, especially at Palsaert group. 

I installed a new 300AH House Battery system with 150w Solar panel and a 40A DCDC charger to look after the fridge and freezer before we left and the setup worked sweet. Cleaned and Vac-Sealed our fillets down each arvo with the inverter and straight into the feeezer. 

Had the standard visit from Fisheries with an officer jumping on board one day and having a good look through the fridge. He was happy and just reminded us of the 300mm minimum fillet size which he reckons is where most blokes are getting caught out. 

Cheers to Rob H for the anchorage advice around the southern groups!