nightstalker

Nice wahoo man. Great first run eh.

You never know, we came across schools of pilchards in 30m last week and were cat hing them on sabiki jigs. Wicked looking live bait, if only you could keep them alive long term!

What do you reckon, worth a try this weekend out around the shelf. We're pretty seasoned fishos but pretty new to this stuff. I'd figure there might be some big dollies and maybe a few striped marlin around the edges of that 23 degree stuff. Any input would be welcome. My mate just upgraded to a Sailfish 5500 with twin 90 etecs so were looking to get out there.

Well done. Persistence and live bait pays off again! Nice king and nice singlet.

Thats a nice fat kingy - hopefully some real stonkers will be moving in around now - love to see a report of a real big one taken in the harbour this year.

Nice work there on the jewies. Looks like the hawkesbury is travelling ok at the moment on those results

Well done, my eldest is five now and my aim when i go on fishing trips each year has been to get a bigger fish than my daughter weighs at the time that i go away. Somehow i've managed to do this for four out of five of those years. So get out there and get yourself a 4kg snapper or king and start playing the 'i can catch a bigger fish than you game' - the kids love it and adds a bit of spice to your fishing goals. I will have to upgrade my species soon cause she looks like she'll end up six foot tall and at least 60/70 kilos by the time she's 12 so might have to move on to some of those big bluefin to keep up.

Looks like a nice morning Ray, catching trevs is great fun on a morning like that.

Hey, everything seems to be running late or mixed up and confused this year. The current was late this year and hung around longer than usual and has really thrown some species off their regular schedules. Good excuse to go back though eh.

Healthy looking red, they pull like trains and are just awesome fish when they come to the surface. Wish i lived on the North Coast - a week or so a year is just not enough!!

Family is great thanks Rick with one just turned 1 and the other about to turn 5. Missus is great or at least will be until i tell her i'm going back up the coast next weekend. I'll save that one until i see what the weather is doing. And as for the PS - if I cant blame the GPS how else can i explain them getting more fish than us for the first time in five years. As far as the 3.5 goes, if its looking flat at Chrissie i'll tow it up and have a look. Its a great little hull which my mate originally bought with a view to launch at Bendagen so why not give it a go if its flat. Dont need an EPIRB, radio or flares in that close and i can swim that far. Mat

Hey Rick, yeh, we were fishing in Sabbatical and yeh, the boys probably caught more fish than us this year but we had a bung GPS and had to go back to dead reckoning and sounding out our spots. We did end up with the best three fish of the trip but. Due to the GPS issues we didnt fish the jewie spot or bother with in too close.... bar was a bit iffy so didnt get out as early as we like either. Good result really given we had a few issues. Heard of a friend of the barcrusher boys who goes to Nambucca at same time as us each year had been fishing 11m off Valla and had gotten a 6.2 and 5.5. Would like to try Valla one day. Whats the launch like there ...... could i fish it in my 3.5 fishnipper on a good day ...... does it fish around Christmas when i'm at Bello. My mate bought 2 boughts off Brian at the boatshed so he's running up to pick one up this weekend and fish with the boys who are there for another 2 1/2 weeks in the barcrusher (Blind Faith Ltd) but if the weathers good next weekend i'll drive up to and he'll tow sabbatical so we can fish and i'll tow the other boat home. Will let you know if were coming. Cheers, Mat

All caught on bait doggie, we only use iqf pilchards - which are very high quality. I know good reds are caught on plastics but dont subscribe to the theory that its better than bait. We berley hard an get good results with bait. I even tried a rig where i snelled a 5/0 hook above our regular 2 hook rig and put on a six inch plastic. This was the rig that the 5.4kg snapper hit but what do you think he hit, the plastic or the pilchard?

Hi guys, just back from our annual South West Rocks trip. We arrived last Friday with 2 boats and five guys renting a house in the rocks. We were fishing out of a 5.3 Barcrusher and a 5.5 Sportsfish for the week. Weather reports were pretty average but in the end we managed to get across the bar six days out of seven which continues a very lucky run we've had for about six or seven years now only missing out on about 3 or 4 days out of over 50. The bar was a bit nasty though so it did mean starting later at times and coming in early enough to have a decent bar crossing. Most days we fished roughly six to eleven. The fishing too, was a bit tough this trip with the quantity of snapper down but we did still get some good fish. There seemed to be a lot of pilchards around with thousands of gannets, skuas (the things that try to eat happy feet) and albatross in the bay hunting them. I'd say the snapper were a bit full this year. We did manage in the end though snapper of 5.41kg and 3.5kg which are good fish for sure. We also found a lot of tuna hunting the pilchards and caught dozens of bonito both regular and watsons leaping from turbo charged midgets through to 3kg models. One day they were in plague proportions and we had a lot of fun catching them on a Sebile Stickshad that we picked up on our recent reef trip. They went crazy for it and we even caught them teabagging the lure that is slapping it on the surface on about six foot of trace hanging off the rod tip. The boys on the barcrusher got raided one morning landing a triple hookup of five kilo striped tuna that gave them some antics for ten minutes or so. I was also lucky enough to score a nice Mack Tuna of 6.6kg on a floater. Some nice smoking runs from that fish for sure. We also got the usual by catch and it really was an aquarium at times with 30 species caught over the week including bream (out on the reef in 20m, tarwhine, flathead, tusk fish, pearl perch, jew, trag and just about anything else you can think of. All in all a fantastic week of good mates and good fishing.

Nice kings fellas, looks like the weather was a bit of something to contend with. Well done.

Nice King Dogtooth!!

Monster tarwhine, well done. Dont think i've ever seen a picture of one so big. Awwesome

Nice longtail man, theyre not fast are they . Hoping to get some on the north coast in a month or so. welldone

That is a friggin long way out - over 80kays??

Awesome kings, they just look so good when they get big like that. Cant wait till the ones in the harbour all grow that big eh.

Yeh, thats the plan next time, as soon as money allows - to do 2 weeks and do wider reefs or even 1 1/2weeks out wide and half a week back inside on one of the split trips. Will be hard chasing bream again now but South West Rocks trip coming up in 8 weeks should help out.

Definately a great bait for bream, use any of the packet stuff and prepare it the night before or even do packs, let them sit for a night and then freeze, bream have long been known to like a smelly bait, particularly in discoloured water. We have gone on to catch flathead, snapper and even kingfish on this bait so give it a go, very easy bait to use, berley with chicken pellets as well to keep the poultry theme going.

Hey guys, nightstalker clocking back on after having gone missing for a while. Mainly working, saving for this trip and fathering another little one. Back to serious fishing but. Turning 40 gave me a great excuse to go on a trip of a lifetime. Keeping it short, you fly to Hamilton Island (aka buggy world - the land of a thousand golf buggies which are the preferred mode of transport - some fully pimped ones too). Stay overnight at Hamilton, drink heaps and then get on a seaplane in the morning and fly 150-200km out to the outer edge of the reef named Bugatti Reef. Well, that in itself was an amazing experience but the fishing to come was also out of this world. The mother ship is a great 80ft cat and dont they look after you. After settling in, out you go fishing on either of 2 18 foot aussie whaler tri hulls or 24 ft Noble centre cab or 24ft Contender T-top. The weather, typically was crap with a combination of wind and rain at times, oh well, but in behind the reef it was still very fishable. They also reckon the fish were not fully on the bite with acres of whitebait having them switched onto different prey to the usual fusiliers. Anyway, we still caught GTs to 43kg,shark mackeral, bludger trevally, red bass, spanish mackeral, longtail tuna, coral trout, rainbow runners and a range of other reefies. Having not experienced GTs before, i was blown away. You buy poppers bigger than the fish you caught as a kid thinking nothing could eat them. Casting these lures on Yamaga rods, Stella 18000s and 130lb braid is a brutal workout and popping them is taxing, you still think nothing will eat this lure that sounds like a dolphin when all of a sudden a big GT puts his head and shoulders out of the water, smashes the popper in front of your face and then its on. They pull like freight trains. With leather gloves on i could barely pull drag off the reel but they are just smoking you up with 30m runs under ridiculous drag, then when they settle in its all you can do with both arms to pull the rod up enough to get one wind on the reel. Twenty or so minutes of this and its over but oh boy, its brutal, insane fishing. Personally i was lucky enough to score a GT somewhere over 30kg plus plenty of others, some good shark mackeral, bludger trevally that would attack smaller lures on lighter gear in packs of 20 all climbing all over each other to eat your lure, longtail tuna that go hard and bust up around you in football field sized schools. I also nailed 2 red bass that i really rate as hard core fighters. One was the first fish of the trip around 5 kilo and would pull a similar sized snapper backwards and the second one was an incredible almost 9 kilo fish that was just a beastly looking animal that ate my popper on the plunge, didnt even get one pop in before i was on. The trip is also made by the stuff you see, 300lb + groper at the back of the boat, fight 150kilo lemon sharks off the back of the boat, 40 squid in the lights at night just to annoy all you squid chasers from the harbour who chase them for hours. We also saw a flying eagle ray about 4 foot across fly about 10 metres, flying fish, longtoms chasing baitfish jumping out and chasing them 20 times in front of your eyes. Also saw 2 sharks chase a longtom for around a minute all around the boat. Had one big mackerel eat a massive popper on the way out of the water and come cartwheeling about 2 metres out of the water before our eyes only to leave me with a ravaged popper and no hookup. Had another big mack smash a popper before my eyes about 10 metres out only to eat the whole thing and bite me off. He sat there in full view trying to headshake the popper loose only to be smashed by a ten foot whaler in a bloodbath before our eyes. It was a fantastic trip, i recommend it to anyone and will be going again as soon as possible. happy to answer and questions about the trip.

Nice Dollies, great size run of fish this year eh, I remember reading months ago Dave Green on the gold coast getting a lot of big ones and predicting they would travel all the way down. His theory is the gold coast around decemeber is a good indication of what will happen further south each year in terms of predominant species, size and so on.

Why wouldnt you be happy with that - fish on tap whenever you want them. Get him to put some trout and cod in there too and you'll have some fun over the next few years.