Thursday

Looking North from the 'Catwalk' at 1770

I had to try at another morning on the Catwalk at 1770. It was seriously cold again but with a completely flat sea and a 2- 4 knot south-westerly whisper of a breeze. The water is still not as clear as it usually would be, after all the recent rain, but it is still pretty clean. I fished from 5.00 until 9.00 am and the results were similar to the day before. The soft plastics got munched by the resident Groper and the slugs and poppers did not raise any bites. I finally caught a small Bream on a GULP Lime Tiger Jerkshad. It was a perfect morning and a fantastic sunrise, but there were no fish.

The great thing about this area is that there are always lots of other options. I went back to camp for some breakfast. Low tide would be at about 10.00 am so I decided to fish the Wreck Rock bay, directly in front of the camping area. This is a small beach framed by two rocky headlands. For about an hour either side of low tide, you can walk right out to the tip of the rocks on the north side and fish into some relatively deep water. Your feet get wet and however hard you try to avoid it, the occasional wave will slap against the rocks and give you a good soaking. I put on a ¼ oz jighead and loaded it with a GULP Lime Tiger Jerkshad. I had now upgraded to 20lb leader, as there are often some bigger fish around this area. There were a few hits from the small dart and then I hooked a small Stripy Perch. I put it back and carried on casting.

I could see fish busting up on the surface a few hundred metres further out and then I saw a few jump and realised they were schools of Tuna feeding on the small Whitebait. I tried a few different plastics but came back to the Lime Tiger Jerkshad. I felt a couple of solid bites in close to the rocks and cast back, as close as I could, to the same spot. The lure had hardly hit the water and ‘zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz’ a fish took off with it. The light spin rod is a 2-4 kg Nitro. It is strong, but not strong enough to just pull this fish directly out of the rocks. After a bit of back and forth, it had wedged itself behind a bommy. A big surge lifted it clear and pushed it more or less to me feet. All I saw was a thick dark back roll over in the water and then it snap , and it was gone. Could have been a Tuna or a big Tailor, I will never know. I could not find another and the tide was now running in and making it to difficult to remain in that location, so I moved off.

The Dart are very aggressive and will try to eat anything

I went back to camp and dried out in the sun and considered the options for the next session. I decided to try Flat Rock again and drove down there at around 3.00 pm. The rock was now covered by the run in tide. I walked a kilometre north along the beach to the point where the rock starts to break down. This is the spot where the water rushes in to fill the gutter between the beach and the rock and is often a good spot for Dart. Over the next hour I caught plenty with the biggest being just over 40cm long. I was fishing with a 1/8th 1 jighead and using the 10lb fluorocarbon leader. I used a variety of GULP plastics that all seemed to work on the Dart – the Turtleback Worm, the 2” Shrimp the 3” Minnow and the 3” Minnow Grub. I fished until the sun dropped behind the sand dunes and then the cold forced me back to camp. I kept the four biggest Dart and ate two for supper.

Four of the bigger Dart from Flat Rock