Noosa River night fishing report

[riveRecon]

Last night my son did the hard work to go out fishing on the boat. It was tops to spend some one on one time with him and get glimpses of the 5 year old that had so much joy in the outdoors!

The conditions:

4-9pm.
Fishing Tide: Run in last two hours.
New moon - 4% waning.
Wind - 5nts (0 at the chosen Noosa River fishing spot).
Water temp 19.5 degrees Celsius. Air temp 14 degrees Celsius.

The trip track: https://deckee.com/maps/trips/summary/855840

After some boat trailer light problems, we got to and launched at the Tewantin Marina boat ramp at 4pm. The ramp was empty, most likely because of the uncertainty in wind strengths. I had some back up plans to get out of the wind if that was going to be a problem.

We always catch our own fresh bait. We searched for about an hour before we finally found the active area of baitfish on the sounder (You’ll see the spot if you look at the track map.) It was next to the new oyster reef system that has been installed at the river. There’s quite a few of these spots along the river now in attempt at getting oysters back into the system again. There’s no anchoring around these so we used the trolling motor to hold position all night.

After several attempts with the cast net we finely got a plus 30cm mullet - lots of strip bait for one night!

We chose our position about 30m off the reef. Anchor light and kept life jackets on (We’ve had one two many close calls of other boats running into us at night) and got to fishing.

Our sheltered position was glassed out. Top conditions to just chat with my son with interspersed excitement moments of fish runs.

We were in about 6m deep water.

We landed a 37cm Mangrove Jack - a surprise to me at this time of year. Returned alive and swimming back to the water.

We had several big runs of some big “fish”. We think what happens is that when a decent fish is hooked, during a drawn out fight a Bull Shark grabs it and runs and then either get bitten off or spooled.

We then landed the biggest Pike Eel we’ve ever seen (estimated 1.5m long and about 5 to 10kgs) We mistakenly got it in the boat and then stood on our chairs taking pictures of it trying to figure out how to get it back out of the boat LOL!

Fresh mullet strips always work well for us. The odd times when we can get live prawns, it’s on big time.

It was a fun several hours and times like these are treasured memories. 

[Little_Flatty]

Fantastic work @riveRecon. Hard to get father and son time fishing when the kids get older!

[james Cutler]

Great report.

Like the Pike Eel well done.

Top photos.

[Steve0]

1 hour ago, riveRecon said:

We then landed the biggest Pike Eel we’ve ever seen (estimated 1.5m long and about 5 to 10kgs) We mistakenly got it in the boat and then stood on our chairs taking pictures of it trying to figure out how to get it back out of the boat LOL!

 

Let the Eel have the boat and swim ashore

[dirvin21]

Braver than me bringing a pike eel or scientifically knowns "digusting toothy slime covered angry spawn of satan" on board

[bessell1955]

How did you get the Pike eel back into the water?

[riveRecon]

The lip grips couldn’t hold onto it when it wriggled and too close to its mouth for my liking, so we had to time the grip and flip off the transom cut out in one movement. Very scary manoeuvre with lots of attempts and jumping around LOL!