Glenelg begins - Wednesday 26/09

After spending the morning packing the boat, we headed towards Nelson, the venue of the next fishing challenge about 3pm and arrived after an eventful trip (Most of Australia’s coat of arms are now closer to extinction) at 10pm. We immediately deployed some rods off the balcony and started to set up. The target fish for this trip were bream, estuary perch and mulloway. The totals would be the combined length of the biggest that we caught of each species. 

When we arrived, I set up my swag on the deck as the alarms weren’t working (We usually have some rods out for mulloway and they have an alarm system for when you get a bite, but it seemed to have rusted over). We started having some bites, but nothing of major significance. A couple of decent takes on some half pilchards, but that was it so we completed the set up. 

At about 1am Thursday morning when I was heading into the swag to sleep my rod, baited with a whole squid took off. I could hear the ratchet of the charter special screaming and then it stopped. I got to the rod and the line was slack but I saw the line swimming steadily upstream. I waited until the line loaded up and struck, and missed! My first mulloway bite and I missed it. I brought the bait back in and the squid was perfectly intact, however had been moved up the line about a foot. The mulloway had spat it out with some aggression it seemed. I think if I have another chance I’ll let it fully take it, as the theory that generally works on gummies of waiting for it to load up didn’t seem to work.