Botany 16th

[mottyman]

Hi Guys,

Geoff and I made the trip out into the bay on Saturday.

We had a quick drift in behind one of the runways to get out of the wind but we weren't setting the world on fire so headed out under the cliffs on the southern side near Kurnell and the sounder was showing heaps and heaps of fish.

To our great disappointment, they turned out to be sweep and bloody pike.

Despite that, it was the most action we'd found all day so dropped the pick, despatched the one livey we had and got a trail going. It wasn't too bad in there under the cliffs out of the south westerly either.

Floating a fillet of pilly down the trail I hooked yet another sweep but bringing it in just felt like a very large squid or something was on him. It would go really heavy, then just the fish, heavy, not, and so on.

When I got the fish to the surface to my absolute shock it was being followed and mouthed by a huge cobia!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The sweep was basically scaled, chewed and had half his tail missing. The Cobia had one look at us and headed strait back to the bottom. All the while our one lonely little Yakka was swimming around happily with a 7/0 hook in him not being harassed in any way, shape or form.

We hung around for a while but couldn't raise the Cobia again. Meanwhile Geoff has managed a nice Leatherjacket.

After a while we decided to head back into the beach of Brighton out of the wind for a flatty. All we managed was one nice keeper and a few smaller ones including the ever present small reddies.

Cheers,

[REKLESS]

Aww,now that would have been a good one Mottyman- a nice sized semi tropical fish,in the middle of winter!!.

i suspect that it would have sparked a bit of scepticism from quite a few people unless photographic evdience was given.I am quite fond of cobia ........where were you again? .

good one

simon

[mottyman]

Hi Simon,

No photographs unfortunately - it didn't stick around long enough as I didn't hook it.

Under the cliffs off Kurnell on the pick.

In hindsight - I should have put a hook in the poor battered sweep and sent it back down - it clearly wasn't interested in the yakka I had out.

I'm surprised as anyone. At first I thought it was a shark but if that was the case I wouldn't have got as much of the sweep to boat as I did. The sweep had no teeth marks, just really beat up like it had been mouthed or sucked on.

I really wished I taken a pic of the sweep at least but I chucked it back and grabbed hold of the rod with the livie on and started bringing up through the water column slowly to try to attract it's attention.

It only hung around the top for a few second before it quickly disappeared but I'm pretty sure that's what it was.

Cheers,

David.