Darwin/cairns Trip

[brettm-c]

Just thought i'd let you guys in on the fishing that i've been doing the last couple of weeks!

headed up to darwin on the 11th to visit friends for a week , my mate up there is also a keen fisho and has a 5.6 center console, so we managed to suggest suitable alternatives to the girls and buy ourselves a few days on the water.

spent the first day just checking out darwin harbour and throwing a plastics around, great day on the water not alot in the fish department though, a few bat fish and a stone fish on a plastic!! don't know if thats a first but im claiming it!

next day we turned down a trip with some of the guys from my mates fishing club to chase jews, and decided to go up the creeks after barra.

WRONG CHOICE, we found out later the other boys had bagged out on black jew while we got stuck in a small hole up the creek after the 6m tide that day had run out and had to wait 6 hours untill there was enough water under the boat the navigate back down the river, the tides are very different to down here they rush in and out in an hour or so and then sit high or low for hours! to make it worse after not scoring any barra but watching a local walk down the river cast his bait net once put on a live mullet drop his line next to the snag we had been fishing all day wait 5 then pull a barra off it and walk away, all of our crab pots where also empty.

day three we decided to head off shore into the blue water. we headed about 17mile out to a spot where there are a few wrecks around, it looked promising with small schools of mack tuna and plenty of bait so we anchored up and dropped baits,

got hit pretty much striaght away with a small GT coming on board my mate scored a bat fish, and it continued on like this for most of the day, landing about 9 GT's, stacks of bat fish, some red snapper, a few emporers and one small cobia! my first but i hope to improve on the size next time though!

Next day myself and the wife said good bye and flew to cairns, we drove up to Port Douglas where we were staying and i proceeded to get every fishing broucher i could get my hands on and start making phone calls,

all of the bigger boats where either booked out or didin't have enough numbers to go so i started calling the smaller operators as the weather looked good and i was hoping that they would make the trip out to the reef.

I ended up speaking to a guy named adam who had a 6m cairns custom craft c/c that he had specialy built with a hamilton jet in it so he could skim over the reef to parts no one else could fish! sounded good!

6am and adam was out the front of my accomadation with the boat hooked up and we were off! the run was a little bumpy or so Adam says ( it would have been considered a great day down here!) but after and hour we arrived the reef, the main goal for the day was to score a big GT with poppers so we started casting around the bombies right away, after only a couple of minutes with no success adam decides that there are no GTs at this spot so we should try some S/P's, first cast a I get bricked into the reef, adams laughs at me and tells me to pretty much lock up the drag otherwise I'd run out of S/P's, so i re-rig tighten the drag on my calcutta and cast again, two twitches and im on after the first heart in mouth surge for the coral i turn his head and land a nice coral trout, we continued with this for about half an hour scoring trout, sweetlip, and spangled emporers on every cast. then adam gets ichy and wants to see some big GT's come on board so we head for a deeper lagoon in the middle of the reef, this place looked fishy but also very trecherous with jagged bombies and fringing reef everywhere, we started our drift and started casting, after a few casts we see a menacing figure shadowing one of the poppers it was what we had been looking for a Gt of about 15 to 20 pound, but after following in the popper a few times he lost interest. As we drifted along we cast to every promising lump of coral along the way we had a few big splashes behind the lures only to have them miss the hooks but then it happened, my self and adrian the other guy on the boat both cast to a likely bombie and started to retrive only to see a pack of massive GT's shouldering each other out of the way to eat our lures, some how they all missed!!! but I cast out again as quickly as I could and watched one turn and run down my popper!! watching this bulldog of a fish charge at my lure and then feel the grunt of the fish as he peeled 50pound braid off a locked drag was pretty awesome and something I have been dreaming of! My self and adrian both caught a few of these fish each weighing in at about 30/35 pounds and adrian landing one that adam estimated near 50 pound was unforgettable!!! in between i would switch over to my light rod and throw around s/p's constanly scoring great fish all day!

just to finish it off a few days later I went for a fish in cairns harbour with the missus, and we scored some good sized bream, a few cod, some grunter, and hooked a decent barra but he spat the hooks near the boat!

Can't wait to go out and chase some kings in my boat tomorrow!!!!!!!!

cheers

brett

Edited December 23, 2007 by brettm-c

[Scon]

some good GT'S there well done

[Little Hooker]

Nice read with nice fish.... ive yet to feel the power of a big Gt's i can only dream of it for now. only landed a 1kg baby off the navy wharf when i was in darwin.

[abiasin]

great work there mate, looks like some magic fishing up there thats for sure catching monsters like that on poppers must be awsome.

[Steve07]

Sounds like some pretty hot lure fishing off the coral reefs off port douglas mate,

some awesome giant trevally too.Well done on stopping the big fish from

busting you off on the reef.