SMALL BOATS, BIG SEAS
Bad weather can result in good fishing – as long as you’re in the right boat and know what you’re doing! By Jim Harnwell. Pics by SCOTT THOMAS
BIG seas and rough weather are not generally regarded as ideal for small boat fishing activities, but the fact is that in the right locations even quite atrocious conditions can result in spectacular action from a range of popular inshore species. Another benefit of fishing in the rough is that you generally have the place to yourself – no-one else is crazy enough to brave the crap conditions!
It’s well known that coastal areas tend to fire after a big blow. Strong winds generate large swells which batter the coast, stirring up the water and dislodging food items from rocks. Heavy rain results in run-off from surrounding landscapes, flooding rivers and creeks and washing nutrients and food into the sea.
All this activity promotes feeding activity by species such as snapper, bream and black drummer. These fish move in close to rock platforms, bommies and ledges to take advantage of the smorgasbord of food in the form of crabs, cunjevoi, barnacles, mussels and other shellfish and invertebrates that are washed in by the pounding seas.
The rough conditions basically create a natural berley trail. When coupled with the fact that the water during and just after a big blow is often turbid and discoloured, which gives otherwise wary fish like snapper a sense of security, you have all the ingredients for a good session.
However, it’s generally accepted that small boats and big seas don’t mix that well, especially when you bring rocks and shallow reef into the equation. So how do you exploit the fishing opportunities without bringing yourself and your boat to grief?
The key lies with finding the right areas to fish. You basically want a location that provides shelter from the worst of the conditions yet allows easy and safe access to the surging washes that attract the fish. Bays and headlands provide ideal locations to escape the worst of the wind and swell while still enabling you to get a bait or lure into the zone.
My home waters of Jervis Bay, on the NSW South Coast, provide access to a couple of spots that I regularly fish during and just after a big southerly blow. The first of these locations looks a bit hairy but is actually quite safe, as long as you keep your wits about you. A bit of swell and surge is vital if this location is to work – it’s a virtual fish desert in nice calm conditions as the water is shallow and crystal clear – but it fires up as soon swell wraps around the point and creates a curtain of foamy white water over the cunje covered rock platform.
There’s a nice gutter next to this shelving platform plus a couple of big boulders flanking either side. Within a few metres the water shelves away to about 5m in depth. All up, this location is an ideal fish-producing location: plenty of food, a variety of habitat options and the safety of deep water close at hand .
The main species I target here are black drummer, bream, tailor and the occasional silver trevally or trophy-sized tarwhine. By-catch species include groper, salmon, kings, samson fish, luderick and silver drummer. Baits in the form of unweighted cunje, royal red prawns or bread produce the goods but I’ve had just as much success in recent years casting 3” Gulp Jigging Grubs in pumpkinseed. Team a Jigging Grub with a small but strong jighead in the 1/8 to 1/12 oz range, 10lb fluoro trace and a 2-4kg spin stick and you are set for some epic light line battles. The biggest black drummer I’ve dragged out of this location was around four kilos and I’ve been done over by much bigger models. If tailor and sambos are more your thing, a 40 gram Raider cast right into the wash will result in plenty of hook ups. I’ve caught some monster bream on the Raider, which just shows how aggressive bream can be. Retro-fitting the Raider with a single hook (I like the Siwash pattern by Gamakatsu) will dramatically reduce snag-ups on cunje and also better facilitate the easy release of unwanted fish.
I’ve only ever hooked a few small snapper in this location. Another spot on the other side of the bay is the local gun reddie location. This spot features a number of bommies all within close proximity of each other, plus a prominent point, some deep reef and extensive gravel beds tapering off into sand. Depending on the tide, these bommies break when the swell hits a metre or so. They are surrounded by deep water so are fairly predictable but it can be a bit nerve wracking to be casting a seven-inch jerk shad into the bite zone only to see a wall of water jack up in front of you… This is a location I fish only when conditions are abating and when the tide and wind conditions are in my favour. A nor-east wind, a building tide and a metre of so of southerly swell usually sees this spot fire. As well as snapper, it’s a great location for kings (of all sizes from rats to serious hoods) plus salmon, bonito and various demersal reef species.
Safety
While productive and exciting, fishing rocky ledges and bommies in any sort of a sea obviously carries with it various safety issues. As with land-based rock fishing, you need to be aware of these risks and your ability to deal with them. Understanding how any given location works, and how swell, wind and tide will affect it, is vital. Having proficient boat driving skills/experience and the appropriate safety equipment is also important. Early in my boat fishing career I also steered well clear of rocks and wash zones. I used to watch some of the local guys fishing these areas and thought they were completely insane. As my skill levels and experience developed over the years I began to realise that while what these blokes were doing looked dodgy, it actually wasn’t. They always positioned their boats close enough to the surge to get a bait or lure in yet far enough away that they were well out of the danger zone; they fished as a team – while one guy was casting, his mate was always on the wheel, motor idling, ready to engage the gears and zip away at the first sign of danger; they always positioned the bow of the boat towards open water, thus providing for an easy escape; they fished locations depending on the prevailing breeze, always using the wind to push them away from danger, not towards it; and if it was just too dicey, they opted for Plan B, usually a beer and a steak at the Husky Pub.
Over the years I gained more boating and fishing experience and began targeting these ledges and washes on a regular basis, racking up some good catches in the process. As a young bloke I was always a keen surfer and I think this experience, which resulted in developing an understanding of wave dynamics and an ability to read swell patterns and see how waves are influenced by tide and bottom structure, has definitely helped fast track my “rock fishing from a boat” career.
Boats
Fishing rock ledges and bommies requires the use of a seaworthy and manoverable boat. You are often fishing in what can only be described as “boisterous” conditions so stability is vital. To get the best results from this type of fishing you need to cast your bait and lure into the zone – you can’t do that if you’re falling all over the place. The Fisho Bar Crusher 670C has proven ideal for this sort of work as the hull’s ballast chamber fills with water when the boat is stationary or only slowly moving – the added weight from this ballast definitely helps settle the boat in the water. The Crusher also has nice high sides, which provide much needed support when casting or fighting a fish and also prevent the incursion of water into the hull. Fishing close to rock ledges often sees backwash from the swells – this has an annoying tendency to slap against the hull and wash into the boat. A self-draining hull or high capacity bilge pump is a definite plus here.
If I had to pick one style of boat that is ideally suited to wash fishing I’d recommend a centre console. The ability to fish along the entire length of the boat comes in very handy when fishing these areas. A recent expedition out to my favourite JB rock spots in some seriously rough conditions really brought home the fishability of a good centre console.
We were in my buddy Riley Tolmay’s new Contender 21. The conditions were marginal, to say the least. A massive low off the east coast had generated 3-4m seas and a solid 25-knot southerly was blowing white caps across the bay. My usual spot, protected to an extent from the wind and swell, was fishable but the boiling surge generated by the huge groundswell meant we needed to fish much heavier gear than I preferred. I always fish these locations two-up – one on the wheel while the other fishes. As mentioned earlier, you need to be 100 per cent confident in your boat and motor as you are depending on it to get you out of trouble. The brand spanking new Contender was fitted with twin 115hp E-TECs – twins give unparalleled manoverability and it’s nice to know that
if one engine unexpectedly fails there’s another one there to get you out of strife.
Once we reached the spot and spent a few minutes checking out the swell, Riley, a super keen angler who works for BRP, the Canadian company which manufactures Evinrude E-TECs, eased the nose of the Contender towards the wash zone and I fired off a cast from the bow. As expected, the surge was simply too much for my light jig head – it was pushing my lure out of the zone before it could get down to the fish.
A quick move to another location which offered more protection yet plenty of surge and wash almost immediately resulted in a nice salmon and then a plate-sized bream.
Fishing aboard the US-made Contender highlighted just how effective centre consoles are at this sort of fishing. I could make a cast from the bow and then move down along the boat as we drifted past the wash. This allowed my lure the maximum time in the bite zone. Once hooked up, I could move around the boat depending on where the fish ran and also respond to where the boat was heading. Fishing these wild conditions means angler and driver need to be on their collective toes. If you need to move, you need to move fast. Even when concentrating on fishing, I kept one eye firmly on the swells and was able to anticipate if Riley needed to gun the boat out of trouble. Plenty of handholds in the form of side rails and struts for the fibreglass centre console made the Contender an easy boat to fish out of.
These stylish and functional boats are high performance fishing weapons – in a previous test on the 23-foot model I described Contenders as looking like “arrows on the water”. The hull design on these vessels is state-of-the-art. This aids immensely in providing a dry ride (for a centre console, anyway!), lateral stability and excellent performance. No boat is perfect, however. The ultra deep vee and flared bow provide a great ride but I found fishability is compromised to an extent as the side decks up at the bow angle away, thus meaning it is hard to lean against the hull when casting or fighting fish.
This aside, the Contender proved a pretty good wash fishing vessel. Stability amid the swell and backwash was excellent, the self-draining hull quickly rid itself of any water that slopped in over the sides or transom and the power and torque of the twin E-TECs allowed us to easily escape any waves that decided to make life interesting for us.
As well as fishing, we were aiming to get a few shots for the cover of this issue so we pushed things a bit harder than we usually would have. Cresting a couple of solid waves resulted in a few free falls that I was sure would be painful. On each occasion the Contender landed stern first before smoothly levelling out and continuing onwards. In lesser boats landing off these waves would have been a bang-crash affair that would have seen our knees relocated up around our ears!
Well known as something of a perfectionist when it comes to boats, Tolmay has spared no expense when setting up his new pride and joy. The console features twin Simrad NSE 12s – one dedicated as sounder, the other as GPS/plotter. Close inspections reveals that these top-of-the-line electronics only just fitted in – there are literally only millimetres to spare. A wet box mounted thru-hull 1 kilowatt transducer provides enough sounder power to reach bottom at least to the 100 fathom mark, which is useful when searching for bait school when gamefishing on the shelf line. A third sounder, a touch-screen Simrad NSS eight-inch unit, is mounted up at the bow, allowing anglers fishing up front full access to all the data provided by the main screens. This top-of-the-line electronics package is fully integrated, meaning data from the GPS antenna, the Simrad broadband radar mounted on the T-top, the engines’ ECUs and even the Fusion stereo system is accessible via all three screens. On the console below the electronics is an array of circuit breakers, the latest E-TEC gauges and the Fusion’s head unit (this also accepts DVDs, meaning you can watch your favourite movie on one or other of the Simrad screens as well). Adjustable Rupp Radials outrigger bases and poles mounted off the T-top with its gleaming spipe work and rocket launchers offset the aggressive hull lines. Storage for tackle is fairly limited, however a number of big underfloor hatches offer room for fish and ancillary gear. Riley has plans for a bait station above the transom and also an encompassing set of clears to provide shelter around the console when travelling in typical east coast chop and slop. After a bit of fishing and a lot of time spent mucking around getting images we did a few fast runs with, into and across the chop and swell in the bay. Compared to a lot of centre consoles I’ve been in, the Contender was pretty dry. That said, a good set of clears would doubtless be a wise investment.
One of the more interesting features of this boat was the trim tabs. Instead of being horizontal with the hull, they actually moved on a vertical plane from a recess in the transom. Pretty cool stuff…
Due to the conditions we couldn’t properly assess fuel and speed data but Riley reports the following:
RPM Fuel Use Speed
Idle 1.36lph 2.4 knots
1000 2.56lph 3.8 knots
2000 14 lph 6.43 knots
3000 27lph 19.2 knots
4000 59.8 lph 27.54 knots
5000 71.54 lph 35.8 knots
WOT 87.44 lph 40 knots
I have to say that I personally prefer plate alloy hulls to fibreglass when mucking around in big seas near rocks. Even a little dingle with a boulder can cause serious damage to sleek white gelcoat… Luckily Riley is a fairly experienced boatie. This experience was put to the test back at the ramp where a huge surge made driving the boat on the trailer a tense affair. The surge resulted in the Contender’s custom alloy trailer actually lifting up and floating around, which doubled the difficulty for poor old Riles. We got the boat safely on without any mishaps, however.
Over the next few days the big low moved seaward and the swell and wind abated. Within a week, a high-pressure system resulted in millpond conditions and my rock spots became clear and calm. Next big blow, though, and the bream and drummer will be back – and so will I. ¦
Contender 21
Length: 21’ 3” (6.5m)
Beam: 8’ 3” (2.5m)
Tow weight: Approx 1800 kgs
Power: As tested, twin 115hp
Max HP: 300
Fuel: 340 litres
Price: As tested, $130,000
FIT-OUT: ***
PERFORMANCE: ****
FISHABILITY: ****
OVERALL FINISH: ****
VALUE: ***
OVERALL: ****
Contacts: Wallrock Marine: www contenderboats.com.au, Evinrude E-TEC: www.brp.com, Simrad: www.simrad-yachting.com.au
