1st Fishing Report - Fingermark
Report for 19/01/2008
My first fishing report is a back dated one for my last fishing trip. Ward and I headed out to a wreck mark wide of Rattlesnake Island. Collecting some live bait on the way proved a little difficult. But with a hand full of livies we headed for the mark. Dodging the plumes of rubbish from the Bohle and other northern creeks we arrived at our destination about 7am. We drifted the mark, me with live bait and Ward on Fly. Current was very fast, and keeping baits/fly on bottom proved difficult. However, within an hour or so I had a couple of quality Fingermark in the boat and Ward had failed to set the hook on a couple too.
With live baits depleted pretty quickly we decided to head over and check out Rattlesnake. Very little of my fishing from Townsville has been done in the Northern direction, and I was keen to have a scout around the islands. Almost at the island and I marked a large column of bait on the sounder. Amazing sounder the Furuno 620. I picked this bait up while travelling at 22knots. And with it linked to my GPS it was pretty easy to spin around and re-locate the bait. They were handing over some kind of bottom structure, and I could clearly see predatory fish stalking the edges. The location was quickly marked in the GPS for future reference. We drifted this large patch of bait for a couple of hours. Ward having FAR more luck on fly than I had on ANYTHING. He seemed to pull a hookup on almost every drift. Main fish in the school seemed to Golden Trevally. And he landed a couple of nice ones. I tried Bumpa-bars, plastics and poppers and couldn't raise so much as a bump! But that's fishing.
My first fishing report is a back dated one for my last fishing trip. Ward and I headed out to a wreck mark wide of Rattlesnake Island. Collecting some live bait on the way proved a little difficult. But with a hand full of livies we headed for the mark. Dodging the plumes of rubbish from the Bohle and other northern creeks we arrived at our destination about 7am. We drifted the mark, me with live bait and Ward on Fly. Current was very fast, and keeping baits/fly on bottom proved difficult. However, within an hour or so I had a couple of quality Fingermark in the boat and Ward had failed to set the hook on a couple too.
With live baits depleted pretty quickly we decided to head over and check out Rattlesnake. Very little of my fishing from Townsville has been done in the Northern direction, and I was keen to have a scout around the islands. Almost at the island and I marked a large column of bait on the sounder. Amazing sounder the Furuno 620. I picked this bait up while travelling at 22knots. And with it linked to my GPS it was pretty easy to spin around and re-locate the bait. They were handing over some kind of bottom structure, and I could clearly see predatory fish stalking the edges. The location was quickly marked in the GPS for future reference. We drifted this large patch of bait for a couple of hours. Ward having FAR more luck on fly than I had on ANYTHING. He seemed to pull a hookup on almost every drift. Main fish in the school seemed to Golden Trevally. And he landed a couple of nice ones. I tried Bumpa-bars, plastics and poppers and couldn't raise so much as a bump! But that's fishing.
The highlight of the morning was watching large GT's push the bait to the surface and bust through them. The fish had to be in the 30-50lb class. And in their dozens! We hooked up a couple of times, but me on 20lb spin gear and Ward on 9-Wt fly rod, we didn't stand much of a chance. Although we tended to pull the hooks rather than bust off get spooled. So maybe if things had held we would have boated one.....Who knows!
Weather was fantastically glassy. We had a full speed, dead flat run back to Townsville. And that was at about 1pm!
Weather was fantastically glassy. We had a full speed, dead flat run back to Townsville. And that was at about 1pm!
