Australia Day Holiday 2014

Scent Blazer Lures · January 29, 2014

Hey Raiders, did another quick afternoon offshore trolling session off Sydney. We shouldn’t have gone out. Most boats were coming in as we headed out, that was our first sign, IT WAS HORRIBLE! But we went anyway with surprising results.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) had the wind forecast at 10-20 knots NE and BOM also says in its forecasts: “that winds maybe up to 40% higher”. Well, it was at least 40% higher. Driving the boat from the downstairs station there were a few occasions when waves came crashing over the bow which covered the entire windscreen with water and I was seriously thinking of heading back. It was like a rough weather scene from the Deadest Catch at times.

Only 2 us of on-board and we anticipated it being a bit rough but we really wanted to use our Troll Pro to get some underwater footage. So we setup our lures and the Troll Pro while still inside Sydney Harbour where it was calm. It’s just too hard to setup the Troll Pro when it’s really rough off shore, the most important thing when setting up the underwater camera is make sure the lures right over the camera. Positioning is everything. So we literally started trolling and filming from inside Sydney Harbour where the gear was easier to setup.

We got to North Head at around 3.30 and f*$K it was rough when we rounded the headland. We did our usual thing, had out 2 lure chains out and 2 bigger lures, a 9 and 12 inch lure for something bigger. We put pilchards inside the bait chambers of the trolling lures to give them their nice fishy scent to get that aggressive strike on the lures. We also ran a small lure that was down-rigged a few feet directly behind our Troll Pro so we could film close-up strike action, that lure was crammed with pilchards inside as well.

We started trolling NE towards the Whale Fad, about half way there way we hooked up on a small Dolphin Fish. Our plan was when we hooked up we would do a slow turn to point the boat downwind and the land the fish while the boat was heading slowly downwind. That keeps the remaining lines and camera in water straight. Otherwise the camera and lures could easily turn in a big mess if the boat drifted back over the gear. With only 2 of on-board keeping the gear clear and untangled in the rough conditions was critical.

More dollies, we got a nice one around 70-80 cm on the lure that was down-rigged on the Troll Pro (footage to come). We passed the Whale Fad and just kept hooking up, then kept trolling NE towards the Manly Hydraulics Fad and we just kept picking up more Dolphin Fish along the way.

The Manly Hydraulics Buoy was a long way off its usual GPS coordinates and we had trouble finding it. When we eventually found it there was a rope about 10 metres long hanging off it that we almost ran over with our props, which is the last thing you want to happen especially in rough weather, so dangerous. I am assuming some f*$Kwit had tied off on it and left the rope on it. This is friendly warning if we ever see anyone tied off to any of the Sydney FADs, we will ram them first and ask questions later ?

Water temp was 22 degrees straight out of Sydney Heads and went as high as 23 degrees around Manly Hydraulics and the water was really blue, very fishy. At around 6pm we decided to start trolling back and enjoy the soft ride going downwind back into Sydney Harbour.

At that point we pulled up the Troll Pro and the lure rigged to it for a quick check. The lure was gone, I assumed the trace got tangled around the camera line and didn’t release when a fish grabbed it. We don’t know what took the lure and we were excited about going through the footage to find out.

We’ll keep you posted, stay tuned for pics and video when we find what it was.

We also have this another Go Pro rig that we made up ourselves that we call “Line Pro” basically it’s a Go Pro with 2 snap swivels that you can attach to your line the after you hook a fish. The camera then slides down towards the fish like a zip line.

Just as a test I clipped our "Line Pro" to the rod on the outrigger, so the camera was just above water filming the lure as it was swimming along. It was literally 3 metres behind the boat. About 2 mins later a Striped Marlin came up and grabbed the lure. Unbelievable, the Marlin hit lure, but the weight of the Go Pro as the boat rocked basically pulled the lure out its mouth. We checked the Go Pro footage and we got the footage on the camera. It happened so quickly but we have shots of the lure in the Marlin’s mouth underwater. We got about 6 frames in total. It got away, but still so bloody exciting.

The Marlin hook-up was only about 2 miles NE from North Head. So they’re out there and really close, probably feeding on the small dolphin fish and the tonnes of slimey mackerel in close.

We’ll post the footage and photos on here in the next day or so once we process our cameras.

Hope you can get out there, the beakies are in real close and there are dollies everywhere.

Happy Fishing Raiders?

Peter