[Hairtail]

I heard the hairtail were on at a bay in Cowan Creek, so I donned the warmest clothes I own, the beanie and raincoat, and headed out in the tinnie.

Arriving at 5am in the dark, I pulled into the bay and dropped anchor. For the next 2 hours, just one undersized snapper and alot of bait stealing. The tide had slid out, and it was bucketing down rain.

Since I was now having no bites at all, I upped anchor and tried drifting the southern side. One smallish tailor. But as I drifted, I realised that I'd earlier been sitting in the wrong bay! There were gulls diving in the right bay, and when I pulled up to investigate, a friendly Raider was there holding up the hairtails he'd caught. He and his mates had been pulling them out in big numbers, apparently, and on all kinds of bait.

I returned home with just my little tailor to show for getting absolutely soaked to the skin.

But thankfully, it's a long weekend!

So this morning, I donned the second-warmest clothes I own, the beanie, waders and raincoat, and headed out in the tinnie. To the right bay.

I arrived at 4:25, burley went in, and I dropped down a pillie on three ganged #3 hooks. I had barely got the second handline down when the first went off. But I grabbed it too soon and too hard, the fish came off. Quickly I put on a fresh one, and set it down again.

A minute later, off it went, and this time I paused a bit before striking. Up came my first hairtail! What a thing. It would pull pretty hard, straight down, and then stop pulling, only to start again 10 feet sideways from where it had just been. As it got up near the surface, the light from my boat was reflecting off its silver sides, making the fish look almost luminescent. When it came in the boat, it thrashed about all over the place trying to take a bite out of anything and everything.

Over the next 60 minutes, I landed 3 more. Dinner is going to be great tonight!

All fish were caught on whole pillies, on ganged #3 or #4 hooks, and a wire trace and a small bit of lead above the trace. It seemed the ganged hooks and wire trace were probably overkill, but the fish didn't seem put off by it at all. I did try using a red lumo-stick, but the hairtail evidently liked it too much, and bit it (and bit through my line too), so all 4 fish were caught without lumo-sticks. I just let the pillies down to the bottom, wound up a meter or two. I fished one handline and two rods - all fish took the bait on whatever I wasn't touching at the time! The fish were 78cm to 95cm.

The difference between the bays: the first bay, with no fish, had very steep cliffs on all three sides, and a fairly small sand-flat that sloped gently down in the deep bay. The second, successful bay, had steep cliffs on two sides, with a long sandflat where a stream came down to the sea. The sandflat dropped off very suddenly into very deep water, 14-22m deep. Also, the water was this deep almost right up to the rock wall, and it was against this wall that the hairtail were biting. There has been a huge amount of rain in the last 3 days, but Cowan Creek's water is still reasonably clear, and the fresh didn't seem to affect the hairtail down as deep as they were.

Many thanks to the friendly raiders.

[Botany Bay - shock catch]

as the saying goes " keep your eyes on the ball at all times"

[massive blue swimmer]

gday raiders I had an RDO today and decided to go for a fish late this afternoon for a couple of hours in the harbour, all in all it was pretty quite but I managed a huge blue swimmer on a prawn! a new raider record at 112mm from front to back and the nippers outstretched were a whopping 83cm across! I took a photo with a spool of line for catch of the month!

your very brave to go out in the weather we are having at the moment - well done