First Day Out On Boat Chasing Kings

[jamesds]

Took out a nice 150HP 6 meter center cab with two mates on Saturday morning.

Met up with the boat hire company at Taplin Park boat ramp at 5:15am. One of my mates was late, so we didn't get in the water until 6am but hats off to Sean the boat hire guy for offering to wait for him before launching. Fantastic service.

After a smooth launch, and with a slightly nervous never-driven-a-boat before driver went out into the harbour armed with a mountain of bait, berley, soft plastics and metal lures to go and chase kings. Luckily, my two Canadian buddies have a lot of boat experience were there to offer me a few hints and tips along the way.

First stop was to get some squid adjacent to Taronga Zoo Wharf. Didn't find any there, so we zipped around to Balmoral where we got one decent size one and a single poddy mullet. After another hour of no bites, we decided to head to the Spit Bridge. On the way we slowly trolled a couple of fresh bought squid and a spangly lure, but caught nothing.

After that we headed out to Quarantine, dropped anchor. There were some fish on the finder, but all we managed to bag was a just legal flounder on a 4 inch Gulp Nuclear Chicken minnow... decided to bring in the anchor and adjust our position after realising that we had been drifting only to bring in an anchor chain with no anchor on the end anymore. At least we had caught a fish!

After that we headed to the marker at the southern tip of North Head, dropped the spare anchor. There were about 4 or 5 other boats around, but didn't see anyone catch anything. There was not much action on the sounder either. We dropped the live squid and the poddy mullet down to the bottom for nothing.

With 2 hours before we had to return the boat, we decided to have one last ditch attempt to get some kingies on board. I'd previously avoided going to the wedding cakes earlier in the day due to being a novice at this boat driving shenanigans and the harbour was pretty busy. But what the Hell, we had no fish yet! So we set off to the wedding cake, avoiding ferries and boat races. Got my mates to rig up on the way and said just fish - I'll drive. Plan was I'd slowly circle the cake.

So we got there and the sounder was showing lots of fish of various sizes, there was a lot of surface activity (which always dissipated before we got there - need to be faster!) and we managed to bag a legal flatty.

So all in all we had a great day - getting out on the harbour in a boat is awesome in its own right, no argument there. It would have been better if we'd at least been busted off by a kingie, but it was a fantastic day all the same. From reading the reports though, it looked as if others were having days similar to ours anyway.

See you all at the Kingfish Social next week!