Botany Bay - 29th Dec

Paul · December 29, 2012

G'day Raiders

Hit Botany Bay today on the yak with a fellow yakker launching from the beach at Captain Cook's Landing Place (Kurnell). We quickly made our way to Yarra Bay to fish a hole my mate had found. On the way, my mate was trolling a lure and got himself a nice 39cm tailor after missing one earlier. When we got there, there were a few boats around fishing for livies. We did the same but no luck and decided to just fish the hole and got onto several pinkies ranging anywhere between 15 - 25cm on fresh prawns. They were extremely fun on the light gear and gave pretty good accounts of themselves. Unfortunately the blue bottles (PEST #1) were out in swarms today and my mate brought his line in with a long tentacle attached which managed to wrap itself around his arm. Once he realized, he was shaking the thing off frantically and almost capsized the yak. It left a nasty mark on his arm but the pain wore off pretty quickly.

After a while, the pinkies stopped biting so we moved further out and had a crack at the bottom of some 20ish meter water near Frenchman's Bay. Again, we got onto some more fun with pinkies for a bit. The bites stopped and we drifted closer to middle of the heads where PEST #2 AKA Leatherjackets showed up. Lost hook, sinker and swivel on my paternoster rig which I didn't mind too much, but when I noticed the line had gone slack on other my rod with a brand new $18 Shimano Lucanus jig, I had that sinking feeling and sure enough the mongrels chewed through that too. That was my first encounter with Leatherjackets and they put a dampener on my day.

We moved a few hundred meters up and I was game enough to rig up again and sure enough the mongrels came for that too. The swell was pretty high and I was a little disheartened so decided to chill for a bit while my mate soldiered on with his rig. He survived the jackets as he had wire on his rig and as we were slowly drifting towards the heads of Botany Bay National Park, he got onto a few flounder including two at about 35cm. This gave me some motivation and I quickly set up another rig. This time the bites were more familiar as I got onto a 30cm flatty. As I brought him in, I noticed the patterns on him were quite pretty, including the tail. I looked at my fish guide and I think I matched it up to be a blue spotted flathead. Anyway, that's another first for me . I took some quick snaps and let him go.

As we got to the Heads, the water depth was good enough to give my plastics a flick. I decided to use my new goto lure (ZMan 3"MinnowZ in Electric Chicken) with a smear of Dizzy's tournament gel (Aniseed) on a 1-3kg rod. Sure enough, on my second cast with a repeated action of 2 quick flicks and a quick retrieve, I had something on it's tail and after setting the hook, it pulled pretty hard and took a few runs and showed a nice shiny Silver just beneath the surface as it was coming up and I could make it out to be a trevally, my first and a new PB that measured 35cm. Unfortunately he came up with a long blue bottle tentacle attached so, it took a while to get rid of that and unhook him but I was still pretty stoked.