Martyn White | Thursday, 23 November 2023
Despite the lure anglers bulk booking the boats, Hawaiian Dave and I eventually managed to get out on the bay on Monday evening. The last couple of years it's been very difficult to get a slot now the lure guys have discovered that they can have easy fishing during the big bait runs. They'll mostly disappear after Christmas when the easy fishing is over though.
It was a great night out and we surprisingly found bass chasing large gizzard shad in the canal areas rather than out in the open bay. We started fishing small flies looking to pick up a few anchovy feeding fish on the lights and did bick up a couple of average size bass on a 2" albie whore before the canal errupted with shad scattering everywhere. It was phenomenal, I've seen blitzes,but never that many and to that extent in 15 years here. It was amazing, it took a bit of messing around with flies to match the bait size and get the presentation right. I started with a 7 inch semper fleye but the fish were blowing up and turning away from it, ditto a bigger bulkhead deciever, I had a few fish eat a 9 inch T-bone, but didn't hook up. Then Dave went a bit deeper and slower with an SF baitfish which proved to be just the ticket. I switched again to a 9 inch Sedotti Slammer- a real favourite of mine when I need a big baitfish - and we just kept picking up quality fish for the next few hours. We didn't get any real monsters but every fish was in the 65cm-75cm bracket and we did see some bigger fish following to the boat, and chasing the fly in to a musky style figure 8. we had multiple double ups, even between the really active blitzes. It was insane!
I also managed to steer clear of silicon for the night too when we did fish smaller stuff, it's pretty nice to add a bit of a variety and bring back some patterns that I'd neglected when I developed my dependency on rubber candies. I think the reworked fly box is going to work out fine.
Even though Monday was especially good, it's easy to see why this time of year has become so popular. Not only are the bigger fish fairly active, they're well fed and in great condition. I've spoken to people who've visited and fished for seabass here, and they've said the eats are often great but the fight are so-so. That certainly can be true, especially in late winter and spring when they're still recovering post spawn. It's not the case in autumn, and although the seabass are pretty much an 8wt fish a 10 doesn't feel too overgunned when trying to pull the quality fish away from structure in the canals or at offshore platforms. But part of me does wish things hadn't got quite so popular.. so I could do more of it.
This morning I did discover one thing I wasn't too happy about; poorly dyed materials it's something that really shouldn't be an issue any more but somehow keeps happening. The semper fly I was using had a a single red saddle hackle wound at the rear end of the body, this morning the red hackle had lost so much dye that it was magenta and the rest of the fly was pink. It actually looks quite good, but that's just a lucky accident it could just as easily be a wasted fly. There's no need for this to be happening in this day and age, dyeing material is a fairly simple process and setting the dye properly is just a matter of making sure there's enough acid in the dye bath. Something that should be totally standardised in a commercial production