Saturday, February 26, 2011

Apollo Bay Big Catch Comp 2011

Let me start this by saying that the weather this year was 1,000% better than last year when we endured fierce winds and horizontal rain, with the Aire river being our only option to fish!

On friday night we picked up Patto and headed to Apollo Bay, getting to register just after 9 (I think it closed at 10!) and settling in for the night. Once again a everyone received a great "showbag" with a nice rapala lure, Freshwater Fishing magazine and a fishvic cap, amongst other goodies.

Saturday morning saw me setting the smoke detector off at about 5.15 whilst trying to manage to cook bacon, eggs, hash browns and toast for Dad, Patto and myself. Not sure that we were the most popular people amongst the neighbours (Particularly when I repeated the feat Sunday morning when toast got stuck in the toaster), but we ended up at the marina about 6.45 and launched. Dad headed straight through the headland, Patto to the rocks to fish and I stayed in the marina, managing one calamari. I followed the path Dad had taken and saw him right out on the horizon. Our targets here were whiting, flathead and pinkies (Hence me catching the squid). I started flicking a 3" nuc chook minnow around and managed a giant pike most casts - But they weren't our target species. Dad came back in, white as a ghost as he had tried to anchor on the reef right out. His anchor had immediately gotten stuck, he was turned around, nearly flipped and had to cut the whole thing off. After bagging him and having a good laugh I started drifting with a paternoster and some squid (Now in strip form) for anything I could get that wasn't a pike! The drift was fast, and I couldn't stay on the sandy patches long anough (Resulting in many bluethroat wrasse and rock cod of various varieties) so I went to the edge of the reef and anchored on the sand. Turns out I had misjudged the speed of the drift, the anchor dragged and a couple of minutes later I was also cutting off my anchor, much to Dad's amusement.

Shortly after we headed back to the marina to find Patto fishless and us also without a keeper so we went to the local cafe to recharge and came up with a plan to hit the Aire river. When we arrived I threw around a few vibes for about an hour for nothing except weed most casts, and Dad had a couple of just size bream in the bag on prawns. I changed to bait, which almost immediately resulted in a 36cm bream (Which turned out to be the "Big Bream" for the kayak section, pictures to come...). Dad also got one about 34cm, so we headed back to the house. Once again, we returned to unfotrunately find Patto fishless.

We drove back to the marina about 7.30 armed with squid jigs and managed 3 for the next morning, where (After the second smoke alarm incident of the trip) we hit Marengo. It started slow (more wrasse and numerous just-undersize pinkies) then I landed a 37cm whiting. With about an hour until weigh-in we needed flathead and pinkies still, so I threw on the trusty nuc chook minnow and straight away got a 33cm model. Dad got in on the act too and soon we had about half a dozen flatties in the bag. We came back to the beach to find Patto....... wait for it....... fishless.

At the weight in we were pretty happy, Dad weighed in a nice bream and flathead, and I weighed in the following:

  1. 37cm whiting
  2. 36cm bream
  3. 33cm flathead

For a total of 106cm. Disappointing with the pinkies, as I landed about 6, however they were all hovering around the 24-25cm mark.

After cleaning up the house we came back to the presentation. Nobody had the grand slam in the kayaks however someone pipped me with a total length of 117cm, which was a great effort as they had 2 of the top fish awards. My bream was named biggest for the kayakers, so I got a fishing rod and bag of goodies including another hat, a couple of DVDs and some scissors. I gave the rod to Patto so he could update his circa WW1 gear.

A great weekend all in all, and hopefully we can get back there again before next year!