Saturday 8th March - Dollies Dollies Dollies

[Evanwz]

G'day

Headed out Saturday morning, early start as the forecast was good - 8-13knot wind, 1m swell/sea - not quite calm that outside but great conditions nonetheless (today - sunday, was an absolute cracker!!)

Anyway filled up with livies (yellowtail) at West Head before heading out wide. We had a plan for a change - out to the fish traps/fad for Dollies, then Boltons or another less known spot for Snapper or Flathead

Headed out to the fish traps around Barrenjoey Wide - a slower than desired run out in the chop but conditions were improving and after not finding any fish traps we headed further out to where we thought the FAD was. Went past a piece of driftwood - a piece of 4x4 maybe only 3 foot long - flotsam i thought.. and where something floats, dollies collect. This piece of wood had some 30 dollies hanging around it - amazing sight.

Quickly rigged a livey and down it went on relatively light gear - not 10m down and it was smashed, by a small'ish dolly - around the 60cm mark - such a fast fight

It was on for young and old for the next 30 mins - we boated 9, all on livies and all smashed the livies in minutes - they were hungry with guts full of fish and other weird looking edible fishy bits...

The water was toilet blue and 22.8 to 23.4 deg C - just awesome

We lost the floating wood and the dollies disappeared so we went for the fad - found a fish trap on the way and gave it a go - pretty quiet and now it was about 9:30am. We got 3 good Dollies then that was about it...headed back for a drift for flatties and got 2 big leather jacket - threw them back and 1 small flathead - also went back

So returned with 12 good dolphin fish that tasted awesome on the BBQ, raw as Sashimi and pan fried as fillets.. yum yum

Get out there while the temps are up

Evan

[bookwa]

Sounds like a great day ! Please clear up something for me . Is the fad still out there? Various reports have it as missing. This time of year two or three years ago ,about 15nm out in that direction ,there were at least 30 traps and there were dollies everywhere I've had my boat up at Yamba for the last couple of years so am now learning the local conditions all over again.

Hope to head out there tomorrow if the easterly swell doesn't get up too much.

[Steve07]

Great catch of dollies & top fun to catch,especially when there biting like that.

Can't beat a good feed of fresh dollies,

well done!

[Andy Loops]

Sounds like a great day ! Please clear up something for me . Is the fad still out there? Various reports have it as missing. This time of year two or three years ago ,about 15nm out in that direction ,there were at least 30 traps and there were dollies everywhere I've had my boat up at Yamba for the last couple of years so am now learning the local conditions all over again.

Hope to head out there tomorrow if the easterly swell doesn't get up too much.

The Broken Bay FAD is definitely still there - was on it yesterday - it is around 2 miles south of where it used to be. You can get the mark here;

http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/fisheries/recrea.../fads/locations

[Sammy0884]

Fantastic report mate, sounds like its time to give the fads a hit again!

[Evanwz]

G'day

I didn't have the BB FAD in my GPS, just the old fish traps around Barrenjoey Wide which weren't there anymore. I did stumble upon a fish trap at the 20'ish km mark out from Lion Island - we hooked into a few there but the key hit was under the piece of 4x4 flotsam... wood would you believe it? forget those fancy fads...

Certainly livies were key - we had about 15 and caught 11 of the 12 on livies and used all 15. I reckon if we ha 20 livies we would have caught 20 dollies

We did try pilchard, it got hit but nowhere near as fast as the livies and the catch ratio was 99% on livies

Anyway back out this weekend hopefully - if the forecast stays good as it is now