A few lizards.

[Short Fuse]

Its been a couple of months since my last trip up to Pumicestone Passage, but this morning, I decided to give it a go. Got to the area I wanted to fish just after 11am and was a bit surprised that the water was still fairly dirty. I expected it to be a lot cleaner than it was. Fishing was fairly slow at first, with just a couple of small duskies falling to the curly tails. Was getting quite a lot of short sharp hits which I put down to bream grabbing the tail but not getting the hook.

Just before low tide, I found a pocket of fish, and it was a fish per cast for around 15 minutes or so, but again, all small. I kept at it figuring there would have to be a larger female flathead in the area based on the numbers of small fish there, but if she was in the area, she did not want to play. As the tide started to flood back in, they went quiet once again, and I was only getting a fish every dozen or so casts. Then the Water Snake decided to go on strike. I could not get it to turn in any direction, and had to give the motor a bit of a bash every time I hit the go button to make it work. Looks like it will be going in for a bit of surgery. At least it has lasted far longer than any Minn Kota that I have owned so happy to get it fixed up and back on the boat.

I did catch one flathead that was wearing a weed encrusted tag, and on checking my records found it was a fish I had tagged in the same area back in mid December last year. It was 285mm when I tagged it originally, and is now 360mm. It is back there for someone else to catch sometime in the future. I pulled the pin at 2.15pm and headed for the ramp. Tally for the day was 21 flathead caught, tagged and released, with sizes ranging from 295mm through to 390mm. Quite unusual to see so many small fish in this area at this time of the year, and they were particularly finicky with most fish just lip hooked.

No photos unfortunately, it has been so long since I dragged the camera out of its case, the battery was flat.

cheers

Jeff

[Fillet`n`Release]

I fished Pumicestone flicking plastics for flatties 3 weeks ago, got 2 keepers in mid 40cm and a few undersized males. Went out last week, and boated at least a dozen 35-36cm fish, it felt like I was catching and releasing the same fish most of the day it was almost funny. Landed another 2 keepers that day. Went out yesterday with a mate fishing the same ground, landed 11 legal fish ranging from 41cm - 62cm, and only 2 undersized fish all day (it was a great day ) I really don't understand why some days are just peppered with tiny fish and others were just all nice solid fish. But it's nice to see the passage fishing well as we're heading into the cooler months. The water has improved considerably over the last 3 weeks after all that rain thankfully.

[Funchy]

Cheers for the report Jeff. Yes it has been very slow in the passage up Caloundra end as well. Still murky water around. I have only been out a few times in the last couple of months but have struggled to find flattys with any size to them.

Hopefully things pick up soon.