All about patience

Well after a few pretty dismal attempts at trying for a landbased snapper after the storms (managed to net someone else's tho) I was invited out on my cousins boat for an after storm fish, how could a say no. After hitting the water around 6:30am we done a bit of drifting for some squid, brilliant four in the bag, perfect fresh bait.

A nice 20 minute motor out to the spot saw us anchoring up in around 14meters of water, with the mulie cubes going into the water it was only a matter if time for some action.

With burley the key I've found is having a nice constant stream going into the water, you don't want big chunks of fish in the trail just nice tiny cubes or the fish will scoff it down and have no room for your bait. One other thing is also try and match your bait to the burley being used, no use using gardie if the fish have a scent and been chewing on mulies.

It would have been around an hour and half before the burley started working with my cousing rod screaming off. The stradic 4000 ci4 and the gomoku storm rod doing a great job of knocking the fish over, if you've never seen these rods they are a bloody great light jigging rod that always loom like there going to snap and fold yet it managed to turn the fish quite easily. Bam first size fish of the morning landed.

With high fives all round, a bit of squealing in excitement and photos had it was back to fishing. The next few hours proved quite entertaining with many runs and hits. Two nice size eagle rays one around the 25kg mark boated, again on the gomoku. At one point even I was getting worries that the little noodle rod was gonna give, but as before it held its ground and turned the ray then quickly knocked it over.

With the bait all but gone and the burley drying up it was last drop for the day, with me yet to hook anything decent. Casting out the bait and letting it sink to the bottom i took in the slack to have the line start peeling off the reel like a bullet. First call was a sambo as the sustain 5000 just screamed in excitement, I can say for a little bit i felt i was gonna get spooled but slowly the fish began to tire. These sustain reels are absolutely awesome, with a reasonable pricing and a lovely smooth drag its a pleasure to use. After around 10 minutes of tug and war the fish slowly begun the float up, as we saw colour the next call was a nice mulloway, wrong again up floats a very nice pink snapper. 

Now as with most fish this is where's my are normally lost, first attempt at landing it proved quite difficult with it not fitting into the net, just my luck. A few more attempts sees us able to get the head of the fish In, just barely and lifting it into the boat. Now I can say that I was more than happy I was ecstatic, hand legs and knees were shaking just from the adrenaline of landing a monster pinky.

With a great day out it just proves that burleying up on anchor can produce some great fish, it may take a while for the scent to attract them but when it does its sure worth the effort.