Waihau Bay trip 02.03.16

It has been a long time since my last blog, you thank facebook for that, I went up to Waihau Bay on a mates boat chasing marlin and managed to get my first one, I will post a video breakdown of the trip ( there is one mistake the pod of beaked whales are in fact false killer whales, very rare to find let alone film. The last 12 months have been hard, snapper the fish I love to hunt have been very hard to find and yellow fin tuna which have been missing from New Zealand waters for the last 6 years with only 1 or 2 caught per year have returned, not in the massive schools of old but a least they'er here with a couple caught in our waters.

Over  days we tagged and released 1 striped marlin and dropped 2 blue marlins as well as catching 1 small MahiMahi

13/04/15 funny old summer

It's been a while since my last post, summer has been and gone, Autumn is coming to an end - sadly, The fishing has been hard with my favorite fish snapper very hard to find all summer, only now are there reports of fish being caught in their usual haunts, the star has been Hapuka (Grouper), with good catches all over the place ( not only in the deep but in the shallows up to 50 metres).
The contest season has been equally hard, I took Gazebo out in the Tuna hunt this year for the first time for only one fish a Albacore tuna 10kg that took out 15th place, sadly I had a large Big Eye tuna on for 15 minutes until the hook pulled, overall 10 marlin were tagged or landed and more were lost.
I went out on Tzer at the White pointer only contest at Waihau Bay, again I had a very large Blue marlin hooked in the 3rd hour of the contest until it also threw the hook, my year for dropping large fish ( Got to take some consolation that at least I hooked them),
In the 48 hour blue water contest I managed to win the open Hapuka section with an 11 kg fish off Tzer.
Easter I took Gazebo up to Bowentown (5 hour drive), we had a day trolling Mayor Island for no joy and the next day taking the girls out for a snapper fish. On Sunday we entered the harbour only contest and I managed to win the snapper section with a 2.8 kg fish and my son Jordan won the other section with a 600gm octopus,
This weekend I take Gazebo and the crew from Tzer up to the Surtees only contest in Whakatane (2.5 hour drive) and the following weekend is the boys cricket trip to Cape Runaway for snapper fishing off the rocks

cunning plan

Young nicks charity contest, well we had a cunning plan - to go up to the Cape Runaway and fish our favorite spots from Gazebo...... To be honest it was our second cunning plan as the first weekend the contest was postponed due to gale force winds and the cunning plan we had planned is so good we will use it next year therefore I can't divulge it. Any way we left Gisborne to travel to the cape, a 4 hour drive, an hour into the drive we go through the Waioeka gorge (60km's long). 10km's to go and boom a trailer tyre explodes, great - lucky I had a spare, to the next small town and a call to the Tyre repair shops after hour number and were on our way again minus $200. The Cape rocks are the northern boundary of the contest so for 3 days we fish the eastern side in ever worsening weather as a low drops down on us while on the western side of the rocks (out of bounds) the sea is glassy flat (check the area out on Goggle maps - Cape Runaway - New Zealand). The fishing is hard, very hard. I managed to catch 4 snapper with the heaviest at 3.7kg, a long way from 12kg we need to win the $10000. My 2 crew struggled to catch anything, Graham managed to catch a couple of Kahawai, one looked good so we thought we would weight it in, he also caught a couple of Blue cod these were filleted and given to to owner of the place we had rented, bad move as it turned out they would have placed in the contest and to make matters worse our Kahawai weighed 2.850kg and was the heaviest ($500) BUT the weigh master wrote down on the sheet 2.285 and good bye $500, that topped our weekend off, but it was a great time away apart from the fishing.

 Cape Runaway

 Cape Rocks

 Cape Rocks in the rain

 Cape Runaway

Sunrise, calm this side rough the other side

discount fishing comp

After 3 and a half months we finally reached the end of the contest, Our winter wasn't the best, with only a few good days for fishing, most of them during the week meaning most of the 50 boats entered failing to get out or getting only one or two days fishing. Gazebo was one of them. I managed to get 13 days fishing on Tzer. I don't get sea sick but most of the days I felt woozy, with one day dry reaching all morning while winding up fish from the deep, such was the conditions must of the time I wouldn't even consider taking Gazebo out. We fished mainly the deep up to 500 meters with electrics or in my case manual reels, We had mixed results from nothing to excellent catches. One of the new places we fished was the Hockey stick, which is a 3 hour steam from port up the coast to the back of the Tolaga Bay reef, 70km from port and 40 km offshore in depths ranging from 200 - 500 mtrs. We managed to get 13 fish on the prize list with 6 going to me.
Gemfish 2.595kg 2nd
Trumpeter 9.510kg 1st
Trumpeter 6.020kg 3rd
Blue Nose 6.655kg 2nd
John Dory 2.000kg 2nd
Electric reel Gemfish 5.200kg 1st

Being a sport fishing club the use of Electric fishing reels in competitions has been contentious so we came with the idea of having a separate competition within the main competition for only electric reels, which was well received by most, but there were a few that were very anti, but you can't please everyone. I now have a 2 week break before the Young Nicks Charity contest (raising money for child cancer) - more later.

30.06.14 another day on Tzer

Got the call from Craig that he had a one man charter and if I would like to make the numbers up, so with 1.5 milliseconds to think about it I said yes. The forecast wasn't that good to start with but was improving as the day went on and it proved right. The morning was sloppy with a meter plus swell running. We went to the same area as we had being fishing earlier, we managed to put the client on to a couple of Personal best Kingfish around 18kg and managed to fill the bins with Snapper, Terakihi, and a nice John Dory,

2kg John Dory

19.06.14 discount fishing winter comp

it's been awhile since my last post - sorry - time just seems to fly, the 3 month long Discount fishing comp started on the 1st of June and already there have been a few excellent fish caught, our sponsor Colin caught a 38kg Kingfish on a jig with his first drop which will be hard to beat. I have been going out on the White Pointer 8.5 sportsman Tzer and we have managed a few nice Kingfish.

 24kg Kingfish

 5 and 6kg Trumpeter

 27 and 28kg Kingfish

 27kg Kingfish

27kg Kingfish

The fishing has been good so far this winter when you can get out, the day above looks calm but we had just reached shelter, out wide it was 2 meters of swell with a fresh wind on it, making for a very sloppy sea but the results were worth it.

04.05.14 catching up

Well the summer has gone and we are well into autumn, the Tuna Hunt has been again we sucked, this year we crewed a new 9.5 meter White Pointer shaft driven boat for its new Lord Howe Islander owners. The weather was perfect but we failed to fire(every place we went to marlin were caught that day) overall 9 marlin were landed for the competition. Between February and Easter we went out a few of times and managed a fed but caught nothing special. Easter I took Gazebo up to Bowentown for Easter, it was good to get out and fish the Harbor again and catch snapper in 2 meters of water, means I may have learned to fish the harbor finally. We got outside the Bar and fished the 23 meter mark and again caught snapper and reasonable sized ones at that. On the way Home I stopped at Whakatane for the Surtee's boats only competition where I was joined by Craig and Doug. The sea was perfect and we heard the snapper were being caught at the 14 meter mark (depth) and true to word there was sign on the fish finder only at 14 meters and we had no problem catching snapper up to 4.4kg. On day 2 again we headed to the 14 meter mark and again we had no problem catching snapper but couldn't beat 4.4 kg. with an hour to go we headed to the shore and in 2 meters of water behind the small surf, Craig and Doug had a soft bait and Craig hooked a 11.6 kg Kingfish, we had to play it like a marlin as Craig only had 6lb line and after 20 minutes we landed it. The Kingfish took 1st place which was great.
Today we went out for a snapper fish in the shallows on Ariel reef, this time of year there should be heaps of snapper around but we struck out with a big fat zero - weird - where are they??. the day was so good zero wind and glassy conditions we decided to head out to Baistows on the 225 meter mark, we managed 1 nice Hapuka and 7 Bluenose which filled the bin. We headed home over a glassy sea - what a perfect day, very rare for us not to have any wind all day.