Trip Report 11 January2017

By Lee on February 10, 2019 • ( 0 )

Myself and a couple of mates shot up to Leigh for a fish on Wednesday. After a bit of fluffing around, getting the kayaks ready, we finally got on the water about 5:30am… conditions were perfect! Myself and Andy stopped just near the Leigh entrance and prepared the sabiki hooks to catch some live baits. As per usual, jack macks proved harder to catch than kingfish! however we did manage to snatch up a couple. I decided to head over to the reef with just too mackies… big mistake!! Definitely should have tried a bit harder to land a few more. My first jack Mack I towed behind me on the way to the reef, we got within 100 metres of the reef and heard some splashing behind me, 3 kingfish were on the chase straight away hooked up to the smaller one around 5kg, chucked that one back.Second live bait I made the mistake of deploying right next to a cray pot! Was actually a decent way away from it when I hooked the second fish but this kingfish was a lot bigger than the first and quickly busted me off on the cray line. Tried jigging for a while but no takers. I did however manage to catch a few kahawai for the smoker before heading out to the deep.
We made our way out to the 45 metre contour, this is an area that I’ve fished for many years and it still never ceases to amaze me the variety of fish you can catch out here! I’ve just added in a photo one of the lure creations I came up with last year. What I’ve done is I’ve taken a Catch Kabura sliding head but I’ve fixed it to a beta bug skirt with a solid ring, this thing was dynamite on the day!It out fished everything that I tried, even soft bait. Managed to land a variety of species out in the deep, personal best porae of 5kg.blue cod very common for out here (South Island eat your heart out 😜)gurnard, kingfish, snapper, John Dory, kahawai!! Total of 7 species over the day.

Wind started to pick up around 2pm so I headed back over near the head of the entrance, I’ve caught some trophy snapper around this area over the years so out went the softbaits. Ended the day with a bloody nice snapper that put up an epic fight on the light gear, this fish was in great condition absolutely beautiful looking snapper, well worthy of a release!Magic day with good mates at my favourite spot in Auckland!!!