Offshore Game Fishing Sydney 9th Feb 2013

[Scent Blazer Lures]

Scent Blazer Crew

Hey all, the Scent Blazer crew headed out from Sydney for a late afternoon trolling session. Conditions were not ideal. Seabreeze.com.au was forecasting 20 knot NE winds. 20 knots my arse. I have to say bom.gov.au is much more accurate overall,in my opinion, for getting the winds and seas right. BOM got it right, it was 30 knots and then some, but we were hoping Seabreeze was right.

After fuelling at Rushcutters Bay, which took forever as there were a few boats ahead of us, we headed with newbie Jason towards Sydney heads at about 3pmthen out to the Manly Hydraulics Buoy. It was rough; in hindsight, we should have headed back and just fished the harbour.

Anyway, being crazy, we persevered and slowly made our way to the Manly Hydraulics Buoy.

Eventually we got near the mark and put out the Scent Blazer trolling lures. (Did you know you could put bait inside Scent Blazer trolling lures so they get more strikes? Big smile).

By this time Jason was unwell, poor guy. We tried to make to him feel better by saying it’s good for you to throw up, it cleans your stomach out, supermodels do it all the time.

It was so rough we had trouble finding it, but eventually we spotted it and trolled around it. We hooked a small Dolphin Fish which got tangled around one of the other lures in the all the wind and ended up coming off.

Water temperature was around 22.5 round the FAD and water was very blue. We decided to head further NE so we could have some time coming downwind on it.About an hour later, we hooked up on a 3kg Dolphin Fish and landed it, nice one for the BBQ. That was about 7NM NE from the FAD. There were birds everywhere, and the sounder was picking up fish everywhere, but they were down deeper around 20 metres down. Water temp was around 22.5 out there as well.

A couple of times the whole bow of the boat got covered in water , so we decided to turn back go down on it, much more comfortable. We even got a few waves come over the side of the boat, which drenched Jason. He was not having good day. We headed back towards to the Manly Hydraulics Buoy. We couldn’t find it; it was hard to see anything with all the white caps. So we pulled in the lures and powered back, that was fun. The boat was surfing down the waves.

Here is a tip: the twofish we did hook we hooked on a rig that we weighed down. We clipped a really big barrel sinker about 16oz on the snap swivel, like the ones they use trolling for Wahoo. This keeps the lure under all the chop and wind swell and make its more visible because lures on the surface are competing for visibility with all the white caps.Often when it’s rough we don’t get any strikes on the surface and only get them on the lures we weigh down. Don’t use a big lure when weighing it down. Use no bigger than a 6” or 8” bullet head, so it stays down with little resistance.

Both hook-ups we got on 6" Nano Sardine Bullet Head weighed down with16oz barrel sinker with Pilchards inside the lure’s bait chamber.

We are heading out again on Tuesday, hopefully the weather will be more favourable. We’ll post another report then.

Until then Happy Fishing!

Peter - SB Lures

[mr.e.p.d]

Yeah I fished all weekend off shellharbour. Terrible conditions. The water is great on the 500 line with a few boats hooking up big blues. The dollies seem to be small down south . Only one stripie tagged all weekend with many fish lost. This week looks good so hopefully someone can tackle the big blues that are about before we head up for interclub

[damian]

nice dollie, and thanks 4 the tip. i'll have 2 try that out