Week In Weipa

[hookerbruce]

Apologies for this written report without pretty pictures only just managed time to write it. Will try and post some pictures in the next couple of days.

Got back from Weipa end of May only just finished doing all the jobs around the house to settle the

debt and then broke the news I'm going for two weeks next year, have to go now the boats booked.

Spent the first couple days fishing the Emberly and the Hey rivers fishing was a little on the quite side.

Perservered with lures and managed to get fish nothing to boast about, a barra just legal, queenies to 60 cm,

bream ,flathead,trevally, mangrove jack, long tom and a barracuda.

Managed to break the good graphite rod 1 hour into the first morning with the steering arm on the motor, not impressed. Went to the sports store and bought a make do rod, just didn't have the same action.

Day 3 we got on board the boat and travelled about 30 km down the coast to picturesque spot called Red Cliffs, anchored up for the night the headed out fishing. Threw soft plastics around the reefs for an hour or so and caught about 30 fish to 35cm in length, coral trout, fingermark, tusk fish, black brown and red oglies, cod and spanish flag.

Then went ashore and fished near the rocks where there was a lot of surface action in very dirty shallow water. I cast surface lures while couple of the others fished fly. After about a dozen explosions on my lure(most witin 2 meters of my feet) I finally connected with a barra around 70 cms which ripped about 10 m of line off the reel before throwing the lure on its second set of jumps.

My next hookup was a barra of just under 60 cms which was landed and released. The next one that connected was a bigger fish looked 80-90 cms this ripped off 40m of line as it charged out to sea in series of half a dozen jumps before throwing the lure back at me.

The fly boys landed a couple of giant herring 1 legal barra and 1 undersize.

Back to the boat as it got dark for T-bones and prawns (and liquid refreshments)

Next morning went ashore and found a lot of action in a little bay just round the corner from the previous afternoons activity fish landed for the morning included salmon, giant herring, queenies, golden trevally and a selection of reef fish. Those not landed included spanaids, GTs, sharks and others we diddn't get to see.

Back to the boat and cooked up a big breakfast while we headed further down the coast to a spot known as Boyds Bay. Anchored up and headed out to chase the big ones while the fly boys went in to fish the beach.

WE hooked up four times to what we thought were spanaids using metal slugs in bait school but bitten off each time.

Back to the boat to be greeted by the big cod and tawny sharks that hang around under the boat the whole time we are anchored there. One day we had five cod from 1m to over 2m long at the back of the boat plus 8 or 9 tawny sharks. Live bait is easy to get with hundreds of trevally between 5cm and 40cm swiming round and round, plus garfish a little wider.

We had another 6 days of fishing lost 20 fish (tuna cobia and spanaids) to the sharks in 1hour one day. We landed a lot of fish including queenfish 110cm x 3, longtail tuna 8 kg spanaids to similar size mack tuna and various reef fish. Spent a lot of time fishing the beaches and another first the fly boys outfished the soft plastics.

The fishing this year was a lttle quite two things I think contributed we had very small tides hence not a lot of water movement. Also the inshore water temperature dropped from approx 27 to approx 24 in 36 hours this was when the big storms that hit south Qld forced very cold air up to north Qld we had to sleep with blankets which just dosn't usually happen in Weipa.

If any one wants more info on Weipa let me know.

[GUDude]

Excellent report ! I hope to do a trip like that some day. Were you using one of the houseboats as your home base ?

Cant wait to see the pictures.

Cheers,

GUDude