Westernport treble

A belated report, but here goes!

We spent the long weekend at the house in Coronet Bay. Well, we spent saturday afternoon onwards at the house, after the obligatory swimming lesson with the kids saturday morning. As soon as I got to the house at about 2pm we headed back to the northern part of the port and launched with a friend's boat at Warneet. It was myself, Dad and Graham in his very sleek looking boat with all of the mod cons. We tell him that he is the absolute epitome of "All the gear - No idea"!

We headed out into Gentle Annie channel (Not usually fishing there and not having a clue where to go) and proceeded to get some terrible yore and couldn't keep a bait in the same spot. We pulled the pin and headed to near Joe's Island (Found using his very nice HDS5 chartplotter/fishfinder). The tide was quite slow so I chucked out a whiting rod (Hoping for a few famous "channel whiting") and then nailed what I thought was a monster yakka. Dad got inspired by this and chucked down a small bait of his own and pulled in a yakka that would have had no hesitation in eating the one I thought was big - This thing was huge! After about 15 minutes when the tide started running out (Very hard as it was a full moon) we had boated about 10-12 yakkas.

As dusk approached, we headed to the intersection of Bolton and Bourchier channels, which seemed to be the place to go on the runout - Right up against the bank at the bottom of the drop-off. We were hoping for a gummy. What we got was a whole lot of nothing, until just after dark Dad pulled in a monster elephant - Probably close to 5kg and it was released as in addition to always stealing our good baits they are also pretty ordinary on the chew. He then followed this with a banjo (Pictured), then nobody else got another bite for the next hour and a half!


We decided to call it a night and back at the ramp we had to reverse the trailer off the end of the ramp as the tide was so low - Dodgy full moon! Graham's car struggled to get the big fibreglass beast back over the ramp's end but managed it with a run up. At least this was all witnessed by some very amused late-night onlookers on the Warneet Pier!

Sunday dawned and we messed around the house all morning, taking one of my sons to catch a bucket full of bass yabbies at the low tide and headed out off Corinella at about 5pm, and although there were heaps of trailers in the carpark we were able to launch almost straight away. We were much more confident on our "home" ramp in our own boat.

First we stopped right near the end of the Corinella channel and put some bass yabbies over the back in 2m of water, hoping to get some fresh bait. We didn't, but what we got over the next hour and a half were 14 nice whiting (30-35cm), and Dad also managed a nice mullet (Bait) amongst his 10 toadies! As the action was non-stop the spot that we started being the only boat in had 7 more boats around us when we left - Next time we have to not get fish on when people motor past!

Then we headed to the top of Mosquito Channel, eager to explore a spot I thought may hold some jewies - There were 3 boats almost exactly where I wanted to fish so we headed south back down the channel. We sounded up some promising arches so dropped the pick. It turns out these arches were pinkies and we were plagued by pinkies from 25-38cm. We kept 5 and released the rest. I have to admit Dad did get the lion's share of these as I had bigger hooks and baits on, hoping for a bigger snapper or a gummy. Again, Dad managed an elephant which was also released.


Just as the tide was dead low (Usually a quiet time) my rod went off and I landed a nice 1m gummy - Giving me my first "Westernport treble" in a while. (Note: A "Westernport treble" on our boat is catching a whiting/snapper/gummy in the same trip).

We stayed until about 1am, catching more pinkies and not getting any respite as they were voracious at the baits. This proved to be a much more productive session that the previous night!

We're taking the kayaks to Apollo Bay this weekend for "The 50cm whiting challenge" and also hopefully hitting up the Aire river for some big bream, so there should be another report soon!