Sydney Bluefin Madness

Mike & myself were sick of waiting for the yellowfin to turn up off Sydney & with reports of a couple of bluefin caught it was decided it was time to get a crew aboard Reef Magic and to head wide looking for some bluefin.
Our first day out saw the conditions improve as the morning progressed and with a crew of 5 on board eager for there first bluefin we set a course towards the area which looked best on the SST’s & current charts. Within a mile of our mark we were pack attacked by bluefin & managed a 4 way way hookup on solid fish. The scentblazer teaser was absolutely getting smashed by fish and as I was trying to pull it in they were ripping it back out of my hands. After an hour or so and loosing one fish we boated the others 3 ranging from 57 – 80kg.

After a week of bad weather we managed to get out again on Saturday and the charts still showed the area we were in last week the area to be. The conditions weren’t great with rain squalls & 15knot south westerly winds keeping temperatures down but we persisted in the area and eventually we had 2 rods go off and the fun began… with one of the fish on a Stella we knew we were in for a fight. After 2 hours we had both fish on board between 65 – 70kg. We had just got the lures back in the water again & the rod with the Stella on it went off and this was a big fish – after 2 and a half hours and at 6.30 at night we finally got the fish to the surface. As the fish came into our floodlight range we soon realised we were in trouble with a great white following right behind it. I was trying to scare the shark by hitting the water with the gaff and i grabbed the leader and quickly got the gaff into the fish and dragged it towards the transom door as the boys on board opened the door I pulled the fish aboard – this is when I had my “JAWS” imagining the shark coming aboard through the back door. This fish was a cracker and would have pushed the 100kg mark.

Sunday we were back out and again the same area produced fish and the water temperature was still sitting around 18.5 degrees, as we approached our mark we had a double hookup while trolling
and unfortunately got bitten off on one rod by a fish trying to eat the snap swivel. We concentrated into catching the other fish and heard other boats also getting multiple hookups, we finally got colour after 50 minutes and boated a nice 65kg model – our first on a scentblazer lure.

We were out again yesterday and the the bite continued with us catching multiple fish on lures, poppers, jigs & stickbaits with the clients keeping 5 fish between 35-70kg and releasing others, we could have caught fish all day. There were a few other boats with us on the same school of fish and everyone was catching them. One fish sucked the popper down so hard we had to actually get the popper out of the fishes stomach when gutting it. Another big shark, this time a mako turned up today and was happy to eat a frozen striped tuna that we feed him and happily swam off and left us alone.
Good luck to all those venturing out & hopefully the bite continues and the scentblazer teaser keeps bringing them to our boat.

 

Cheers

Damo