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Sydney chopper time

The weather is warming up, the baitfish are starting to make themselves known and the surface action is picking up in the Harbour.

Almost every day last week from my office window I noticed schools of baitfish being hammered by tailor, salmon and the odd king – with the constant distraction of lost fishing opportunities it seemed as though the weekend would never come.

Last Saturday saw me launch my new boat for its maiden voyage (see Blog “New boat shakedown”) with most of the day spent travelling around Harbour searching for surface fish. The first stop was where I’d noticed the fish feeding during the week. It didn’t take long before Fisho’s Mick Fletoridis was pelting out a lure towards a surface boil within casting distance of where I spend my working week.

The kings were extremely fickle and only came up momentarily before retreating to the depths. It was the same story with the salmon. We left the first flighty schools and threw some poppers around for a couple of half hearted follows. Wanting to test the boat further, we pushed out to the heads and found schools of slimies a kilometre or so out. We caught quite a few slimies on jigs, plastics and fly while attempting to lure any predators lurking around the bait.
Apart from the slimies there was a clear lack of top water activity in and around open water. Not having any live bait equipment on board we pushed back inside and continued a search pattern while running the engine in. We literally ended up back where we’d first started and soon found schools of tailor breaking the surface. From that point on it was a tailor frenzy as fish after fish attacked our lures with gusto. Trolled Rapala X-Raps worked a treat when the fish weren’t showing on the surface.

In amongst the choppers were schools of kings, however, not having a sounder made it tough to pinpoint the baitfish and target the kings more actively. It’s still quite early for the kings to really fire but in the meantime there are plenty of choppers around the usual haunts and best of all they’ll eat almost anything you throw at them! Fun times…

 

 

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