LAST month I covered part one of my Swain Reefs trip on board Big Cat Reality Charters with Wilson Fishing. This month is part two – filled with more epic fishing and great memories. Swain Reefs test With an action-packed four days of fishing that was to follow, it would be impossible to mention everything in this article, so I’ll …

WELL, it’s been a while between articles but after a crazy 2020, which I’m sure many experienced, I’ll endeavor to try a little harder this year. I did manage an epic trip to Swain Reefs in my 7m boat and followed this up with a drive to the central Queensland coastline near Yeppoon, where we fished from the Shoalwater Bay …

THE thought of driving six-plus hours to your fishing destination for a weekend trip can put you off at times, but when there’s 15 to 20-knot northerly wind predicted at night, there’s no better place to go than the Bunker Group reefs because you can tuck in behind the reefs to rest easy after a big day’s fishing. With this in …

BETWEEN bad weather and doing a new electronics refit to my boat, it had been a while between offshore fishing trips. With the new Furuno DFF3D, autopilot and another Furuno TZtouch2 multifunction display installed by Quality Marine Electronics I was keen to try it all out. With a reasonable weather forecast predicted, we soon found our way out the Wide …

Unfortunately, this wasn’t a good move and not far from the boat I got sharked and it was all over. I was gutted and knew it was going to be a tough day. I went back for another drift and hooked another red. This time it was all on camera but I got sharked not long after hooking the fish …

It wasn’t long before I started finding large pinnacles that produced a good mixed bag of coral trout, maori cod, red emperor, spanish mackerel, goldband jobfish and redthroat emperor. As the day progressed, I continued searching and kept finding massive pinnacles that produced some nice fish but overall the fishing was pretty slow and the ground I was finding was …

It’s pretty amusing to watch but still somewhat frustrating knowing we are losing quality fish. I moved on and decided to go and check out the rock I had found last year that I mentioned earlier. As I sounded over I was blown away that it had no life on it at all. I was disappointed but as I’ve mentioned …

The larger reefs and bommies generally hold better numbers of coronation trout purely because more structure is on offer, but a small rock the size of a car can also produce these fish as long as that rock has the protection the trout needs. Coronation trout are aggressive feeders and will usually smash baits as soon as they hit the …