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Shake & Baking Brooms Head
- Category: Brooms Head
- Published on Sunday, 12 September 2010 12:59
- Written by Josh
Stars aligned for me while kayak fishing Brooms Head today, though not without getting off to a nightmare start to kick things off. Launching into the drink just after 4:30AM in near darkness I zigged when I should have zagged and being that it was low tide, soon found myself momentarily marooned on reef with mirage flippers rendered inoperable. Thankfully waves were crashing over the sneaky patch of reef, which gave me enough lift as they passed to paddle out of harms way. Unfortunately this was the very moment that I discovered that the magnetically 'secured' nav light attached to the front hatch of my kayak was not in any way crashing wave proof. As it floated underneath my tramp I also discovered that it floats... just. So as a wave loomed upon me I leaned out onto the tramp to grasp it, the following wave nearly washing me over the side. Sadly I was unable to catch this comedy of errors on video because it was simply too dark at the time to try.
I did, however, manage to capture a lot of video afterwards - almost an hour and twenty minutes worth. A great deal of this footage involved catching fish, and some rather nice ones at that. Between pre-dawn up until 9AM I'd managed to catch a dozen fish, lost a couple more and was also able to record a bunch of very useful marks. Quite deliberate in my approach today I went to sea with a very blade-centric approach. Blade lures have been on my mind a bit lately so today I decided to focus on them almost exclusively. Results were impressive.
Starting out with a large metal Shake & Bake blade in the shallower water the first fish was hooked in about 8 metres of water, christening my new light rig reel (Daiwa Certate 2500) which is spooled with 12lb line and fitted to my Nitro Distance spin rod. Once out a little deeper I threw out another blade, this one an even larger blade of a Qantas style white-body red-head complexion. It too was nailed soon after, a fish of similar size taking it in around 9 metres.
Following this the Shake & bake blade was hit a couple more times, in one instance the fish shaking the lure and eventually being chomped (by what would have been the biggest fish of the day) and swum under a reef. Regretting only packing one of these I then concentrated on the larger blade, trolling it around from mark to mark mostly. I was sailing at around 5kph when a tougher fish took hold, giving me a great fight on the Viper. A fish of around 3kg came aboard and my smile grew even wider.
Feeling as if I'd conquered this particular area I sailed further to the north to a triangulated mark with intentions of taking a few more accurate marks from my sounder. Right where I started seeing significant activity on the sounder (right where I took my first mark) my heavier trolling rod started kicking around in it's holder. This time the fish had fallen for a Rapala Magnum lure and as soon as I engaged the fish I knew it was a beauty. I was trolling another line at the time and I managed to get this tangled up with the fish as I reeled it in, although it was fairly easy to manage the catch regardless.
Several more pinkies were caught - all of them on the Qantas blade - and a Squidgy pilchard flickbait accounted for a few cod and Sgt Baker. By around 9 I almost started feeling sorry for the fish and withdrew the blade from commission for the day, opting instead to troll for a while, fully enjoying the relaxing sailing conditions instead. Thankfully the wind dropped off just long enough for me to record the footage for the planned 'Ultimate Fishing Kayak' clip as well, so that, including some footage of these spring-time snapper will go live this week.
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