Snapper season begins

For Dad and myself, snapper season usually begins with a trip mid-October with some pilchards and californian squid, a random spot and a lot of hope! This year we thought we'd change things, particularly after the successes we've had over the past 10 months or so using fresh bait.
As we're heading out over the weekend, we decided to hit Mornington this afternoon for some bait. Dad was to pick me up at 5pm, and true to form he rocked up about 6.15. His rods were also still at the holiday house, so I gave him one of my pre-rigged rods to use so we had one each. This didn't leave us heaps of time so we quickly chucked the yaks onto the roof and away we went, launching about 7.
It was very slow and I picked up a nice squid about 7.30 on a yamashita 2.0 natural.
About 7.45 I had a massive screaming run on my jig and then it jumped! A very nice salmon had taken my squid jig ad was obviously stuck! Shortly after the jump he spat it. Just after 8 I landed another squid. Dad was now trolling his jig around and I changed to a plastic after seeing the salmon and a fair bit of surface activity. I had a few casts but it was getting pretty dark. As we turned to head in Dad finally hooked a squid. He got it to the boat and without a net was trying to grab it for quite some time before it pulled free and into the depths. That gives him 3 trips in a row without landing a good fish - I bet he'll use some of my nice squid on the weekend and pull in an 8kg snapper!
I threw out my plastic to troll in and it was hit within 5 seconds. After a fun fight I pulled in a fiesty little salmon, destined to become bait for Big Red. I threw it out again and got another one after about 30 seconds. It was quite dark by then so we headed in, with the total being 2 squid, 2 salmon.
I'll have to go back on thursday evening to try and make sure we have enough bait for the weekend!