24/25.09.11 Tui contest

Well how time flies, the Tatapouri Sports Fishing Clubs 2011/12 contest season has started. I was up north for The Alice Cooper (very good) concert Thursday /Friday and drove up and back along the Bay of Plenty coast line and the sea was as flat as could be, as far as you can see and no swell at all both days. I got back Friday night and Saturday was the first day of the Tui (my favorite Beer) contest, so it was load the boat and try and get some sleep with a 4am start and with the rugby world cup being played in New Zealand that's not easy. The last time I looked at the weather (Wednesday) web site it looked real good for the weekend.

24.09.11 I pick up Murray at 4.30am and we head up to the Tata ramp and have to wait 30 minutes for enough light to launch the boat and notice there is a bit of swell breaking on the reef, a good metre, we launch and head out wide to our far Hapuka spot 50km away, by the time we get there the northerly wind is up making fishing uncomfortable. Catching nothing by 9am we move back to TR1A 10k's away and spend the next 3 hours getting punished by a building sea for one 8kg Hapuka and one Trumpeter(not in the contest), we decide to move 17k's down the coast to BR1A and start to do our first drift, by now the sea is just not nice and we manage to catch 4 small Bluenose in the 2-3kg range. By 4pm we call it a day and head home, the last 15 k's to the ramp the sea improves greatly with a northwesterly wind (offshore wind). We hear most of the fleet haven't done very well in the shitty conditions.

25.09.11 After little sleep. (Rugby world cup, NZ's All Blacks played France in a pool game and won and in rugby league, NZ's Warriors won and made to the grand final) as well as losing an hour to the start of daylight savings. We finally get to the ramp at 6am to find the swell is a bit bigger (a solid 1 - 1.5 metre) and a strong northwesterly. We head out to south rocks and half way out the wind drops and the sea smooths out so we change plans and head to BR1A again and in beautiful conditions catch another 8 Bluenose, but still no Hapuka. We decide to head back to South rocks to try and catch some of the other species in the contest. After trying several of our more productive rocks and finding nothing we tried a rock that had fished well in the past, we saw some sign and dropped the anchor in desperation. The sign looked like barracuda and the first drop I caught one....damn. So down I went again and straight away a double hook up of good prime snapper, Murray dropped down and again a double hook up, half an hour later we had 16 snapper in the bin before we dragged the anchor and lost the school of snapper. We managed to weigh in a couple of 2kg snappers - not big ones but at this time of year snapper are hard to find in our waters.
At prize giving Murray managed 1st place in the Hapuka section and 2nd place in the Snapper section and I managed 1st place in the Snapper section. So we managed to start our season with a good result.

10.09.11 Mixed bag

All week a large high has covered New Zealand giving beautiful settled weather, as per usual the weeknd it all starts turning to custard. Saturday gave us to only window of fine weather before the rain arrives Sunday, So with that in mind we head out at 6am which is not bad seeing I have been laid low all week with the worse case of man flu you can imagine, haven't had a real sick day off work in years and as the weather starts to warm up I get sick...great, hopefully that's it for another 5 years. Anyway getting back to real stuff, the sea is looking good so we head out to the puka fields 40km out to sea, The sea has a light sea breeze on it already but conditions are still good. I drop a 3 hook puka (Groper) rig down, 2 large circle hooks and 1 smaller one, straight away good bites and a nice fat Terakihi in the bin, 2 drops later and with 3 Terakihi in the bin that's my wife's dinner looked after. I change rigs to 1 large circle hook and one medium sized circle hook and straight away again and large 6.6kg Trumpeter is in the bin soon followed by 2 smaller ones. Murray catches the 3rd Trumpeter and finally gets on the board and unbeknown to me is where he takes over and I stop catching. Around lunch time he catches a nice 15kg Kingfish down in 180 metres of water, followed by a small Hapuka. With the fishing or lack of - we decide to head south to look at new areas around Baistow's (17 km away) but on the way home (well sort of). Between the 2 areas, both are at 180-200metres deep is a trench that goes down to 550 metres, there are a couple of good sea walls to look at that rise up from 400 metres to 260 metres that should hold good fish. One of these we stop at and drop our gear down. Murray doesn't muck about a hauls up a nice 5kg Bluenose (excellent eating) and tops it with a double hook up of 2 more, meanwhile I'm just winching bait and empty hooks up and down but that's fishing.
All in all a good day on the sea.

03.09.11 Tatapouri Sports Fishing Club prize giving

This year it was Murray's turn to collect the silver ware. The RA Lane Snapper Cup (12.380kg Snapper - Pinfish). The Silver Tray for Heaviest Hapuku (71kg Bass - Pinfish). The Ole Tuck Trophy foe Heaviest Hapuku over the Tata ramp. The Ray Webb Trophy for the Bottom Fish Fisherperson of the year - 3rd year in a row Team Gazebo has won this trophy, so all in all not a bad year competition wise hopefully we can do just as well this season if not better.