We launched at Apex park just before 5am along with a couple of other boats. Cruising past Bullock Island where there were several big boats launching as well. Must have been a fair few out there yesterday.
There wasn't much of a swell, but what there was with a bit of chop meant we had to cruise at about 20knts. So it took a good 2.5hrs for us to reach our spot. We did however get the pleasure of watching some big boats fly past us on the way out. It was pretty cool to see them coming in the distance, then disappear off over the horizon.
When we reached our spot in 600m I sat back and let my brother-in-law take over. He's been watching all the youtube vids so I let him stitch on the squid and tie on the breakaway. When all looked good, we dropped it over the side and waited, and waited, and waited. 5+mins later the line stopped spooling out and we were on the bottom. A few tugs after taking away the slack on the line and we had broken off the brick and our bait was away. So our first ever drop was a success! Pretty happy about that.
We tried where the cursor is. The mark is a spot re-tyred suggested as a good starting point. Maybe we should have gone deeper?
Around 45mins later we decided to check our bait, so after winding all 600m back onto the reel up came our completely untouched squid. At least the stitching did it's job and our lights were still flashing their psychedelic colours. Out comes another house brick, and we do another drop.
After around 10mins we hear the drag start screaming off the Talica and we both jump up from our semi snoozing states to see a couple of dolphins swimming away. One of them must have caught the line briefly. lol.
Around 12pm we decided to call it after retrieving our still untouched squid, but we weren't finished yet. Surely in these depths there must be tuna and marlin, so we trawled for a while for nothing.
Next we thought we'd try dropping for something (anything) in 150mts where it looked like a fishing spot based on the contour lines on the map. Here at least something chewed our bait, but nothing got hooked.
Great run back
Determined to catch A fish, we cruised back to the reef off Lakes and dropped some bait down on what looked like a good spot. Again no bites! At this stage I would have been happy with a Bulleye Gurnard, but couldn't even entice one of them so went back through the entrance, queued up at the ramp with the rest of the people looking to put their boats back on trailers, and came home to the ridicule of our wives.
The weekend wasn't a complete loss though. I scored a big slab of Mako from the boys who brought it in on Sat.
