Hello everyone
Finally it looks like the weather has settled down, around 10 inchs of rain in 9 days, huge seas for all directions have certainly stirred the whole fishing scene up. Just before the Australia day long weekend there were small Black Marlin everywhere with most boats tagging between 6 to as many as 12 fish per day and all in around 30-40m of water, nearly all these fish were around the 15-25 kg mark and it seems both lures and live bait were doing the trick. But as you know a week or so is a long time in game fishing and reports coming in late yesterday from up at Port Stephens wasn’t very good, it seems the small Blacks at this stage are gone however its only early days so far this week and with a bit of luck they should reappear for this weekend just in time for the Lake Macquarie Big Fish Game Tournament which was cancelled last weekend due to the bad weather.
This will see the start of the game fishing season in our part of the world with the Shoot out next weekend followed by the Port Stephens Inter Club 23-24TH – 2-3RD of March, looks like plenty of Brownie points will be use over the next month by all of us, good luck to all of the competitors in these up coming events . Offshore fishing has had its ups and down the past month, Patrick and I headed out a few weeks ago and struggled to find anything but Yellowtail so at around 11.00am we decided to head out a little deeper and try our luck and it paid off with our bag limit of Trag from 2-2.6 kg at one stage Patrick had a double on which sorted him out for a while and yes he landed both of them and the biggest as I have said many times before I have taught too well, maybe he might teaching me a few tricks.
In the Lake Bream numbers are increasing as we head towards Easter (29th March) and with all the fresh in the water a lot of these fish have ended up in the Swansea Channel, even yesterday afternoon you could clearly see the colour change in the channel with the clean ocean water pushing up against the dirty water about half way to the bridge this would also be happening in the Harbour where there have been some very big Jew caught over the past week some fish over the 30kg mark.
As for the beaches things should start to improve over the next few days with the seas calming down, so far this week there have been a few Bream in the morning and a few Tailor of an evening, now for those who are wondering about live beach worms due to the large seas removing tonnes of sand from the beaches north of us, so it may be a few weeks before we see any, it seems live worms are still in short supply.
Regards Jason
