Longtails Spring Back in September

September already! Two words - LONGTAIL TUNA

They have returned. Some quite big in size too!

 

Spring is over... Already!!!

December 1 -

The busiest part of my year and it looks like the first week of December is a complete write off for me. It has been relentless northerlies, a cyclone to the north east, and later in the week a south east change, but winds of great magnitude. This is a shame because the fishing has been fairly good, and steady.

The bread and butter, surface feeding has been constant and fairly easy going. Early November was still a bit touch and go, with the fish plentiful, but extremely fussy. The bait was micro and obviously plentiful. Tuna and mackerel blinkered by the all too tasty fish candy. Often captures spewing loads of bait into the boat and all over us, even after prolonged battles. In saying that the best lure was the trusty streakZ from Zman, spun at lightspeed.

Towards the end of November a massive influx of fish came to play. There were epic numbers of explosive tuna and slashing mackerel turning Platypus Bay into whitewater. AND, the bait had grown in size! The predators were mostly spotty mackerel and mack tuna, but there were a few longtails in the mix. Goldens and cobia also there if you were ready to respond quickly to the scan readings. I even caught a few roaming reef fish under the surface feeders. As always, sharks often wreaking havoc on the more prolonged battles.

Its now at the point in the year where I stop targeting reefs for larger pelagics. The sharks make it an extremely wasteful endeavor. And if I were to do it every day, you can imagine the numbers of trevally and cobia I would kill. It isn't right, ethically and from a business perspective I am destroying my assests. Especially when I have tuna to play with, tuna tend to swim higher in the column and are less likely to be sharked. Moving from school to school helps too, because once the taxman finds you they will keep making claims. I will still capture trevally on less heavily populated reefs, where the sharks are less likely to call home for the warmer months. Also I will occasionally find the free roaming schools of trevally that sometimes don't have a resident shark in tow, if I can hang tight with these schools the catch rate can be epic. However I need ideal conditions to drive comfortably enough for accurate scanning, and sometimes actually see the schools visually.

 

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