Bait stocks running on empty

At 5:15am on Sunday 9^th February, Wayne and I launched “ABF” off Cape Vidal. After stopping for livebait, we headed north to Oscar with a handful of maasbanker in the well. I rigged up the same spread as the day before and trolled over the pinnacle on the first pass, the deep line went away but almost immediately got converted to a shark which we broke off. I rerigged and started the approach. Before the reef even picked up, the deep line smoked off. Wayne took the strike while I cleared the other deep line. Wayne had his fish near the boat when I saw a greenish brown shape materialize from the depths. The fish made a quick dash then got converted. The drag was pushed to sunset and about 10 minutes later, a hook straightened and the head of the once 10kg cuda came into the boat. On the next turn, the surface bait on the flouro went away. I took the rod and went up on the drag right away. It was not long before I had a 5kg bonnie in the boat which we released.

Not wanting to waste any more bait on tuna / bonito, I stuck to 3 rods with wire traces. In the next 3 passes, we had a few chops on the deep lines and so we checked the lines quite regularly. Wayne was busy checking the one livie and had it swimming about 2m behind the motor when a 12kg cuda came flying in and snatched the maasie. The line was pulled out of his hands as the cuda took off! The fish then doubles back creating slack line, but the sinker which was still attached to the line reached the rod tip and no more line could be retrieved. With this slack, the hooks pulled… it was not our day, but at least we were having a few pulls.

I made a wide turn and approached from the deep side of the ledge and as the showing started, the deep line went away. I pushed the drag to the button then gave Wayne the rod. He put serious pressure on the fish and managed to get his personal best kaakap of around 7kg. Some good eating fish.

It was now 8am and the bait stocks were running on empty. I only had 3 livies left. So they had to count. There were several boats around us, but everyone was complaining about the sharks. We were the only boat to have a whole fish on board but that was also just lucky. I decided to move off the reef a bit to see if the gamefish had not moved away from the sharks. Wayne had also seen a cuda jump out the water a few minutes earlier. We had just gone off the deep end of the reef, in 50m of water when the surface rod’s tip bent a but then came back Wayne said that he thought there might be something there, so we kept an eye on it. While we were watching, the rod bumped as something chased the livie. I was sure it was a sailfish, so ran back to feed it. Before I could get there, the rod had loaded up and the reel gave a few short bursts… typical of a billfish. I tightened up and the fish took about 100m of line right on the surface at a constant speed. I gave Wayne the rod and turned in the fishes direction. It gave a few head nods, then the hooks just pulled. There were no marks on the leader and the wire was dead straight. I can only assume it was a sailfish that had been foul hooked, but who knows. By 9am, we had not had another pull. We needed to be out of the cabin by 10am, so we packed up and headed back to the beach.