JonD

Not wanting to put a downer on things but I had similar issues with my hds8 and a tm 260 not picking up in deep water. Sold it on eBay and went back to the 200-50htz deepwater which picked up bottom much better for deep dropping. I personaly think the 260 narrow beam loses bottom as the boat rocks which gives the poor old Lowrance a dizzy spell it can't recover from untill it gets back to 300m or less. For offshore tuna hunting I set mine to a max of 80m so it will only search to that depth and any fish between that will show. I figure if they are deeper than that the chances of my cubes finding them are slim anyway. Jon

We've had a couple from the surface at night from Narooma but the daytime fishing is best. We've been hooking up on our first drops out of Mallacoota and boats around us are all getting several hookups each day most days. I would of thought if Browns had plenty of swords more would be getting hooked up deep dropping, my thoughts would be to look for kinks and drop offs around the 500m mark and target them on the bottom through the day. Night time sword fishing is tuff going on most people (even those who don't normally get sick), a rocking boat with no horizon to see can take some getting used too. When you get pesky blue sharks etc swimming all around the boat gear can soon end up in a huge mess. On the other hand seeing the fish and squid that are attracted to the surface lights is amazing, especially things like flying fish that my daughter likes to scoop up is her net. Jon

Fished a little to the south of you and could here some good catches of bigger fin a little further offshore than us. We were 50 km offshore and most of the boats were another 30k past us ( to much for my 5m rib). We did find big schools of pilchards feeding on krill and pushing north. There were even some devil rays feeding among them, a close relative to the manta ray. My daughter jumped in and got a few pics before they moved down to deepwater. I'm looking forward to heading up to the bay to explore the area at some time soon and good to find someone from the area. Jon

Just like to say hello and looking forward to getting involved in all things fishy. I fish with my kids and enjoy anything to do with being in, on or under the water. We do a little of everything from surveys to offshore game, including night time broadbill fishing. After many years of owning many of Australia's leading boat brands I'm now using a small zodiac rib for everything from inshore to hitting the offshore seamounts down here in Narooma. I don't target the big fish so much due to back problems but leave those to my 15 year old daughter ( who also tends to do everything these days!!). If any members saw the underwater broadbill images in the last two Bluewater magazines these were from my daughter ( she's even taken over the camera gear!!) Anyway enough waffling on, looking forward to more fishy tales. Jon