had my first trip (with a boat) up to port Stephens this week, massive shout out to scratchie he offered to come out with us and share some of his massive amount of knowledge of the area from simply just getting in and out of the bay in a small boat to trolling for marlin and everything inbetween.. cannot thank him enough for this as me and my mate learnt more on Monday than we would of in 10 trips by ourselves!!
we started with live bait at cabbage tree the water was alive with bait so didnt take long at all then headed out to broughton for a look around for some snapper, not great conditions or time of year for snapper but gee we learnt alot and I managed to get my first legal snapper on plastic which was awesome👌
we then slow trolled livies back towards fingal along the way catching as many small dolphin fish as we wanted haha although no marlin strikes once again learnt a hell of alot.. on the way back in we trolled some lures around for bonito and had a look at some future snapper locations. it was unreal to have someone like Jeff on deck with us for our first trip cannot thank him enough!!!!
the rest of the trip was spent in the bay we got into some flathead on plastics (got a few well over 50cm but nothing huge), squid and tried our luck at live baiting a jew on tide change just after dark but had no luck.
great trip we will be back at least once a year to fish this amazing location and hopefully catch up with Jeff at the same time.
cheers josh