Huge schools of anchovies have arrived and it won’t be long until the pilchards come in as the water gets colder. This means the predators will follow and also means more consistent and larger workups.
We had a great day on 25th of March fishing huge schools of anchovies. They were hiding under the boat which meant we had a ring side seat to the Kahawai smashing through the schools over and over again, producing a natural burly trail for us, as we dropped our jigs to the hungry snapper below (Orange 100g Sliders seemed the flavour of the day).
The weather should also calm down a bit wind wise and we should have smooth seas and great visibility. This make it easier to see the bait schools and rafts of gannets (they will sit in an area on top of the bait and predators waiting for the dinner gong). We saw this a couple of weeks ago as we were heading to a spot. The gannets were rafted up over a large area so we started drifting through them and “bang” started catching snapper. All of a sudden the birds got up and I saw dolphins coming towards us. We had a couple of hours of amazing workup fishing right where we had stopped!
Look out for my latest “how to” article on Autumn fishing in the NZ FishingNews.
The fishing has started to get better closer to Auckland now and we are still catching good snapper inner harbour around the container wharves on the way home from a day out wide. There is also good fishing now around the inner islands and places like Park point, Motuihe and, Rangitoto channels and the East Coast bays are firing with good schools of hungry pan size snapper. We are heading out wide in search of the bigger specimens (40-80cm) and are finding these fish past Anchorite and towards Great Barrier, top of the Coromandel and along the outside of the cable zone in about 45mtrs.
Looks like we have some windless days coming up so a good time to go wide and nail a PB.
See ya out there.
Nik Key is a tutor, guide, lure tester and charter skipper
Cheers Capt. Snap (Nik)
o21 596 074
Snap Fishing Ventures
“Nothing ventured nothing gained”
http://snapfishingventures.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Snapfishing