Mackeral Fishing

Well lately the offshore conditons on the Northern Rivers have been pretty ordinary with the recent rain and severe winds, but on Saturday the wind has eased and a clear window of oppurtunity to tackle some offshore fish.

Launching the boat at Woody Head around 6am, we made our way to some waypoints we had saved where we find quite a bit of bait for livies. No luck with catching any livebait so we ended up trolling out into Shark Bay where a few boats had gathered under a group of birds.

Motoring over there we discovered there were fish busting up some whitebait, which the birds were hovering over.

Casting around raider style slugs past the busting up fish which readily scoffed down our offerings and the fish ended up being Spotted Mackeral all larger

than 70cm long, bigger than the fish we encountered the previous trip.

After about 2hrs of chasing the schools of fish we had bagged out and decided to head back home, a great morning fishing with 10 mackeral greater than 70cm each and the largest at 90cm.

Gold Coast Bass

Well on the 22nd January I travelled North about an hour and met up with a mate of mine, John who was in charge of putting me on to some bass within the Clear Island Waters (CIW) on the Gold Coast.

The water was slightly dirty after all of the recent rain and flooding, but there was quite a large amount of bait swimming around. It was also very windy which prevented much surface fishing for the day.

Clear Island Waters is a subdivision based on constructed canals, the water is freshwater though pre-exisiting boat launches and pontoons indicate is was once salt or at least brackish. There is lots of pontoons and extensive weed banks along the concrete and rock walls.

Well at a lesuirely time of 10:30am John and I launched via a small park and peddaled South slowly trolling an Atomic Hardz Deep Crank 38 in Ghost Gill Brown, though I was more interested in the possibility of surface fishing underneath the jetties and pontoons. Which did result in a good follow underneath a pontoon at the Southern limits of CIW.

John had picked up a few small bass so far until I landed my first, as we went along I found some more bass willing to play and the biggest at 32cm TL.

There are bream living in this waterway and proving this were two at 31cm and 35cm for John, who had now landed all his fish on a Dark Green Maria crankbait.

At around 1pm we decided to head back in and I preceded to pack up and drive to Hinze Dam which is in the hills West of Nerang.

Here I met up with Chris another KFDU member and we started out slow downstream jounery in search of some bass which apparently were biting according to some paddlers that were already on the dam.

After a pleasant 4hours of fishing I finally got a hookup on a large something which buried me in the lilypads, losing my beloved Lucky Craft MS Black Sammy 65.

Well following a nice day fishing for bass I packed up and headed for my accomodation for the night.

(Photo credit John C.)

Hinze Dam