Headed out on Friday morning with a couple of mates to check out the spring workup action that has been happening along the east coast up to Kauwau. Decided that we would leave at a gentlemans hour of 9.30am (it was supposed to be an afternoon bite time around midday on-wards). We found our first workup just before Tiri channel around 10am. This was full of big KY and pan sized snapper (35-40cm). We nabbed a few here deciding that we would make the boat limit 35cm at this stage squid was catching them on a lightly weighted Zman paddle tail in New Penny colour, and I was getting them on the new 60gr Flipit in pink. The workup went a bit quiet and we moved on towards Motuora where there were masses of workups spread over a vast area. It was about 1pm and we thought we would be in, but then we saw a boat doing donuts and realised that it was a man overboard and spent 3 hours saving the guy and waiting for coastguard and his boat to run out of gas.
Well that sort of ate into our fishing and we tried the general area but it was real slow. Time for a change of plan. We headed out to the 45 mtrs mark just north of the elbow (outside of the cable zone). It was 4pm and we found some birds, dolphins and whales. Squid put down anew Zman Motor Oil jerkshad and nailed this nice fat fish. Got a few more about the same size to finish off on softies (the jigs went quite).
Looking forward to the next couple of months chasing the spring workups.