Manic Monday

The last few months have not seen allot of fishing action with work, boat renos, travel and weather all getting in the way to stop me getting out. When Monday's forecast cam eup it was decided to take a day off and head out into the bay for only the second time since Xmas. Seeing it was shaping up to be such a calm day, the wife decided see would come as well so with both of us taking a days off we headed out about 6am launching from Manly.

We stopped and had a look around the eastern reefs of Wellington Point, trolling for Mackerel but didn't find much except a bunch of weed so we pushed further out to a spot past Harries, found some good bait holding over structure after sounding around for about 10 minutes and dropped the new electric anchor (gotta say I am loving that bit of kit!).

Things started pretty slowly with a few undersized squire and smallish Grassies coming on board but as we were fishing very light it was still good fun. We managed a couple of legal Grassies so we were happy dinner was sorted and the wife was loving watching the Dolphins, Turtles and Dugongs playing around the area - really makes the bay a special place. I was busy watching the constant bust ups that were going on all around us - some big, some small but they we everywhere - even some cool airborne action from Tuna amongst it all. The wife was having fun so decided to stay anchored and just watch the action from a distance though.

I nearly always have a floating bait on a baitrunner out when I anchor and this was getting constant hits from smaller fish with a couple of what i would say were strikes by Mackerel but as yet no hook ups. Nine out of ten hits on this floating bait will end in not much most of the time but occasionally, you hit pay dirt. I was just finishing a bite to eat and the baitrunner went off it's tits - line flying out of the spool at a huge rate of knots. This was either a bit Mackerel, a Shark or a Tuna.

Trouble was the baitrunner I had put out had maybe half a spool on it after a few good seasons last year so I was down to about 50m of line left before I got my act together and then by the time I was actually fighting the fish , I had about 20 meters left. So taking a chance I tightened the drag and managed to slow the critter down and it started swimming up current so I had some line back. It stayed pretty close to the surface and as I got it closer, I could see it was a decent Longtail. The Mrs is going nuts by this stage and I am telling her to get the gaff ready and we may need to pull the anchor up - none of what I said she really understood - but we got there anyway.

Lucky for me this was a pretty well behaved Tuna - it did one more run and I needed to do some rod work at the back of the boat but it was well under control , doing small circles and after a bit of time it was close enough to get a gaff shot into and get it over the side. It had swallowed the bait and was firmly hooked which would have explained why it was somewhat well behaved - though I was lucky the leader didn't wear through. Now it was bloodbath time as I spiked, bleed and gutted the fish but it was soon all done and on ice. Certainly was great to get a Longtail onboard - love a feed a fresh Tuna.

So with that done I had a bit of a break and a beer whilst the Mrs kept fishing and pretty soon she was onto some good pan size Snapper - we ended up with five for the day as well as a couple of Mackerel thrown in so all in all a very productive and fun day out in the Bay. One of the highlights besides the Longtail was a massive school of Tuna that swum straight past use - would have been 10-20 of them just cruising under the surface.

About 1pm we pulled up stumps as the esky was pretty full, we were running out of tackle and the men in the grey suits had started to hang out with us. I was busy until about 6 that night cleaning the boat and processing the fish but it was a great day and we celebrated with beer and Sashimi.

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