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Cracking the beach jew


ginko

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Snuck out of the office at 5:01 and headed straight to local tackle store, who advised on the best beach, the second best beach, and, well, the beach I could get to given the amount of time before the tide came in.

A box of best squid and away I went at top speed.

I got to the beach (central coast) and damn, there was a guy with one rod, taking the best rip, and another rod taking the second-best rip, and, well, I took the next one along.

Twenty minutes later, the guy's best-rip rod goes off, and it is some hell of a fish. He'd been fighting it for a good 20 minutes when suddenly my rod went screaming off

I'd been instructed "do not strike too soon" ...

After 3 seconds (feels like an eternity), I struck and was into a solid fish. The guy up the beach brought up his fish - it was either a shark or a ray (later on, I didn't quite hear what he'd caught, but it had gone back in the drink).

Meanwhile, my fish was swimming to NZ, and I was down into my backing before I could gain the upper hand.

But then the fish came in without too much trouble - and I washed it up on the second attempt with a beautiful swell hitting the beach at just right moment. And there on the sand, I could see a huge pectoral fin flapping up and down. Jewie!

Woohoo! Finally cracked it after about 2 years of trying to get a jewie off the beach. (almost all in Sydney).

I haven't been able to measure it up yet, but it is filling the bar fridge in my hotel room, and for sure, the PB will need updating.

Details:

Caught right at high tide, just before dusk, a few days before new moon. Barometer something like 1012 (a high, but falling). about 10 knots onshore wind, and ~1m swell.

#7 Konan hooks, snelled onto 60lb leader, 110g star sinker, 30lb braid. The beach has rocks at both ends, and a reef straight out from the centre, and it is a horse-shoe shape - I was in the centre of the horseshoe.

I had a really good cast - straight out into the rip, and a fair distance out, so close to the bit of wash of the back edge of the sand bar of the gutter.

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That's a great first Jewie.

Congratulations well worth the effort.

I hope the second comes quickly,then the third.

There is nothing like staring at the waves, watching sunset, the stars, then THUMP. ZZZZZZZZZZ .

Well done.

Ryder

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Fantastic work mate you should be really proud.

Unfortunately for you from now on you will probably have a bug that gives you trouble concentrating on things like work and probably miss out on a lot of sleep planning and chasing more of them. There is something addictive and mesmerising about that silver on the sand as you now know.

Thank you for sharing your experience with us and we wish you many more.

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It was a bit hard to measure, as I'd had to clean it at the beach, so the head was not quite in its normal position, but I estimate it was right on 1m. (Although I did like General Zod's thinking of 1.20m!) The cleaned fish (no guts or gills) weighed 10kg. I got 6kg of nice fillets from the fish, which looks like it will be 4 feeds for a young family.

Re: Rod and Reel - a 12ft 8kg rod, and a daiwa windcast baitrunner reel. The rig set up was a ~50cm trace running straight to star sinker, then another ~30cm trace that runs along the line-to-sinker trace with snelled hooks at the business end and a swivel to run along the line-to-sinker trace.

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