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.
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