Well it had been a looong time since Lucky had been out for a fish and during his absence his fish stocks had mysteriously vanished through the appetites of Merman and Hotstuff.  (who could blame them with red and trout in the freezer)  So with next to nothing left we decided that we had to take it upon ourselves to go and replenish the stocks, especially considering the weather we have been having lately.

Heading over to the islands we spent the morning spearing in clear water, there was decent tidal surge and swell making things a bit more interesting, but still well and truly good enough for what we wanted to do.  I won't go into the spearing details too much, but one thing I must say is I have never seen so many well and truly legal trout in all my life.  At one stage there would have been a school of 6 of them swimming around underneath me following me from ledge to ledge, one of them almost tickled himself on the end of my spear.  Getting back to the boat and telling Tim what I had seen he pretty much repeated the same story of what he had encountered on a totally different part of the ledge.  We didn't end up finding any easy to get crays over the session, but ended up with 2 trout, 5 bluies and 1 green jobfish and a nice bag of goodies.

As the wind was starting to drop we decided we should look for some ground, not having much luck we went back to an ol faithful that had produced many a time.  First few drops weren't really producing much, I think only one small spangled came over the side and we lost a rig or two to sharks.  We then changed the drift a bit and started getting a few more small (but size) spangos which went back, I then lost my rig to a shark and thought it was time to pack up as it was getting late.  We went back around again and Tim had one more drift and got some thing small, calling it another spangly it hit the surface bright red but undersize.  Hmmmm we thought, I re-rigged and Tim got a nice 50cm Jack and I got a decent moses perch.  We reset again where Tim got bitten off and I got a small spango.  Tim decided not to re-tie and waited for me to provide inspiration and bang, up came a nice jobbie to complement the tidy bag we had.  Upon seeing this Tim decided to rig up and around we went for what we had called for the last drift of the day.  Living up to his nickname, a torrid tuggle ensued and Lucky brought up a beautiful red at 68cm and we couldn't think of a better way to finish the day on.

We got back to the ramp and with less than knee deep water managed to push it across the sandbar to retrieve, another 10 minutes and we probably would have had to head down to the marina to get her out.  In all a top day, thanks Lucky.  Hopefully it will be out into the depths next week to do some more exploring!  On a side note, there's been some excellent catches at the local comp on this weekend - a 9kg red, 7.5kg trout, 22kg spaniard, 23kg wahoo and lots of other bits and pieces.

Cheers,

Adam

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