Fishing Summary
This is an overview of the fishing, locations and techniques used throughout the week. The catches for each day will be the subject of seperate articles with photos and video.
Locations
We started the day with a fast boat ride of about one hour. Some maps of the locations will be shown on later articles. Most of the week was spent fishing in open water over well known fishing "marks" that were recorded on the boat's GPS. Unfortunately, due to a language barrier, we did not receive any kind of briefing as to why each "mark" was chosen - which is a shame.
Techniques
Almost every day had the same routine: -
- Popper fishing in at attempt to catch Giant Trevally (GT) from the surface
- Jigging to catch fish at/near the bottom
- Bait fishing on the bottom with bait comprised of fish pieces (not live/whole fish)
- Break for lunch
- Spinning with light gear for Bonito (small Tuna)
- Trolling four or five rods from the back of a moving boat to tempt fast fish from the top layer of water
Popper Fishing
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| Popper |
A popper has a large concave dish at the front. When cast in, it usually floats vertically (head-up). You retrieve it with sharp pulls on the rod that cause the head to displace a lot of water and create a popping sound and bubble trail that attracts many aggresive predatory fish. This is a tiring form of fishing but can be very exciting.
Jigging
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| Jig |
A jig is attached at the head end and lowered directly down from the rod end to the bottom. A rapid up and down movement of the rod is accompanied by reeling in to cause the jig to bounce up and down in the water and mimic a wounded fish.
Jigging and bait fishing were not well managed by the skipper because it is important to fish fairly "slack" water and to stay on/near the "mark" so that you are fishing straight up an down. Unfortunately the skipper was more interested in grabbing a rod to do some popper fishing while we were jigging. This lead to the boat moving away from the "mark" and often to rapid changes in depth. This resulted in getting snagged on the bottom several times and often meant retrieving the bait from very deep water as we moved away - a lot of lost fishing time.
Spinning
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| Bass Wedge |
These are small lures that can be cast quite far. They are used when a flock of feeding birds and a shoal of Bonito have been seen attacking a bait-ball of smaller fish. The idea is to retrieve them in sharp movements to mimic a fleeing bait-fish.
Trolling
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| Trolling Lure/Rapala |
Trolling involves towing a lure behind the moving boat. We typically used four or five rods/lures at the same time. Each lure is designed to operate at a different depth that is set by the size of the lip, the weight of the lure, the speed of the boat and the length of line to the lure. The lure will wiggle from side-to-side at the intended depth. The boat crew were very good at setting differing depths and locations for each lure and managing that through the many steady turns of the boat.
Summary
Both Garry and Kevin (experienced in this type of fishing) thought that the fishing did not live up to their expectations. As you will see in later articles. we did catch fish and some nice ones at that. However we had long periods where we seemed to be using poppers, spinners and jigs in areas that seemed devoid of fish.
Also, we made several suggestions/requests to the fishing boat skipper as the week progressed. However we were completely ignored and he continued to go through the same routine each day. One example suggestion was based on the fact that we had caught a few nice fish trolling in previous afternoons but also liked the excitement of casting poppers/spinners to surface fish feeding frenzies. Therefore our suggestion was to go trolling whilst keeping an eye out for feeding birds or for large numbers of Bonito breaking the surface then head there and spend a few minutes popping/spinning until the fish moved on. Then, back to the trolling until more feeding frenzies were located. This seemed sensible and a good way of edging our bets and keeping us active but fell on deaf ears.