Page 58 - Bush 'n Beach Fishing mag

Changing it up on close-in reefs
* from P56
of doing what we don’t normally do.
around 6-7kg that made the old broomstick bend and the 925 Alvey load up.
of hard bottom, with a couple yielding more nice fish.
were beginning to think Luke was intimidated in our company, but he kept chipping away and quietly contributed to the box.
ing up the screen every time we went over iso- lated rubble.
We travelled over a heap of flat barren bottom until we found the smallest rise with hints of life and growth showing on the sounder.
A few people knock the concept of an older rod and reel combina- tion, but it worked so well for George... and because he consistently pulls so many big fish with it, why fix what isn’t broken?
Quite a few kilome- tres further on – and only by watching the sounders – we ran over more patches of rubble, and one drift yielded a cracking red emperor for me and a ripping coral trout for George.
The one thing that helped find these small isolated pieces of bot- tom was the dual-fre- quency transducer on the Lowrance HDS.
Not only was the view of the seabed widened considerably, the bits of growth on top of the seabed were clearly vis- ible.
Rather than sound around and potentially spook any fish in resi- dence, we started a drift up-current and dropped our rigs to test the wa- ter.
After a few drifts over this location for several stonker tusk- fish and mixed spe- cies, we moved to find more low-profile rises
These fish were hang- ing close to a verti- cal patch of bait, so we hung around for a while.
Set to a broader man- ual range and zoomed in several times to a small window of about 12m on the screen in 200 kHz, the 20-degree cone angle was light-
Now, I’m not knocking my Furuno 587 stand- alone – which performs very well in deeper wa- ter – but the 1kW nar- row beam through-hull transducer has a cone that’s far too narrow to perform comparably in shallow water.
Straight away, George pulled up a crack- ing grass sweetlip of
George and I were having a good day and
If it was the standard P66 600W transom- mount, it would have been a different story.
The author and George with a cracking red emperor and a ripping coral trout caught on the same drift over a rubble bottom.
Page 58 – Bush ’n Beach Fishing, October 2020
George pulled a pearl perch around the 60cm range, which went back, and I scored one slight-
On one of our first trips to Turkey Beach, we managed quite a few good red emperor on the eastern side of La- mont Reef, so we head- ed there to try our luck.
We had no success with big model reds, though we hooked stacks of larger but still undersized specimens, and a few other species for the icebox.
After that, it was up to the inside of Sykes Reef to explore that area more.
Redthroat emperor, tuskfish and coral cod made up the bulk of the catch, with an oc- casional coral trout.
After an overnight at Sykes Reef and a good sleep, we were ener- gised and couldn’t re- sist breaking the trip theme by heading east to a deeper ridge in search of bigger fish.
* continued P59 www.bnb shing.com.au