I know its a bit naughty but I launched on my own tonight - It was just too good an opportunity to miss and my usual fishing buddy had other things to do this evening. I had been mentioning to Mike for a few weeks about an underwater reef I had been wanting to try for bass. Usually the reef creates quite a swell even on calm nights so its difficult to get too close without fear of being tipped out the yak, but tonight it looked nice, maybe due to the depth of water on the bigger tides, so I had a go. I cast in my favourite lure of the moment, a yo zuri crystal minnow and set off trolling. I passed all the areas on the way that I felt might be good for a bass but the rod never twitched. After about 20 minutes of paddling I was over the reef but again the rod never moved. Feeling rather disappointed I decided to set up for a bit of jigging and just as I came to a halt the spinning rod arched over and the ratchet was screeming as a nice fish started to strip line off the reel. Quickly I reached behind me and pulled the rod out of the holder and the tip was slamming into the water.  After a bout 5 minutes of gaining line then watching it being stripped from the reel again the fish just seemed to give up. Somethings not right I thought, has it come off ???. But the rod was still bent double. The fish had lost its fight. Then it surfaced, I was instantly disappointed to come face to face with a rather large pollock, admittedly a very nice fish but just not what I was after. After several attempts to gill the fish and lift it out of the water I had it in the yak and it filled the seating area. As I have no use for pollock I resisted the urge to bang it on the head so I could weigh it later and I watched the fish return to the depths below. I estimate this fish to have been somewhere around 7-9 pounds and it certainly went well on the spinning rod. It was a beauty and under any other circumstances I would have been over the moon with the fish, but it just wasn’t the monster bass I wanted.

After several more fruitless drifts over the reef I switched to the jigging gear. Instantly I was into a nice red cod which turned out to weigh 4 pounds 2 ounces. Then I had several more before I hooked into a cracker only to loose it half way up. Around 8 ish I decided to head for home so cast out the yo zuri again and started paddling. No sooner had I set off than the spinning rod was off again and another fish was stripping line off the reel. After A brief fight I boated a nice schoolie that weighed 2 pounds dead. Several more passes over the area resulted in nothing so I headed for home.

All in all it wasnt a bad night and I ended up bringing home 3 cod and a nice bass having returned a big pollock and several mop sized codlings. Another thing I noted whilst out there was an abundance of small fish about 6 inch long leaping out of the water. Im not quite sure what they were but they were pure silver. I think they would either be small herring or maybe schoolies. Has anyone else seen these things leaping about off our coastline ?