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Saltwater Assassin – Trip Report Langs Beach – Sunday 28 June 2014

By Lee on July 12, 2014 • ( 0 )

With the thought of big Snapper lingering in my mind for the whole week, it was time to get out for a fish. I posted up an invite on NZ Kayak Fishing Forum for a trip up to Langs Beach, only an hour and a half north of Auckland.

Left Auckland at 3:30am eagerly keen and over excited, in hindsight we could have left at 4:30 and still made it on the water before day break, anyway more time to get prepared. Had a great turnout of keen kayakers from the kayak forum, ended up launching with 7 people.

Some of the guys were keen bait fishermen so didn’t venture too far from the shore.

I tried the inshore shallows for half an hour or so using Zman soft baits, I picked up a couple of small fish but nothing decent.

From here I decided to go for a mad paddling mission, damn near padding all the way too Mangawhai Heads.

I found some good pockets of sign on the sounder in around 20-25 metres of water, I could see that the fish were aggressively feeding well up off the bottom as the sounder was showing a triangle like shape leading up from the bottom with a bait school just above it. I’ll try and include some screen shots of the sounder in the next trip report.

I deployed a orange Catch Beta Bug and was hooking up on the drop about half way down, done this multiple times with some good fish landed. I had a couple more drops after not hooking up for a few minutes. Wound up the slow jig at speed and got a solid hookup at around halfway up, it was definitely a snapper, I had it on for 3-4 minutes before losing it – not fazed at this point as I had already boated some good fish.

SnapShot(3)

Fish for the future.

I found the sign on the sounder again, this time I switched over to soft baiting using the new Ocean Angler Microwave rod matched up with a Shimano Sustain 4000 reel. Same thing the fish were smashing the lures well up off the bottom (using Zman Bruised banana) yep great day!!

I highly recommend taking the trip up to Langs, It is such a beautiful stretch of coastline to kayak around and can produce some great catches of Snapper.