queensland Brisbane River Shark Trip 16/11/18

The Mad Hughesy · November 19, 2018

Made the call early last week to do an overnight trip out in the bay with the hope of tagging some sharks. Upon launching at the port of Brisbane just prior to sunset and trying to push out of the mouth, I soon knew I needed to run with plan B. The bay was a nightmare, waves crashing over the bow, 15knot winds (thanks willy weather forecast) so we decided to anchor up just outside the mouth of the Brisbane river for the night instead. We put some baits out (stingray flap, mullet and 30cm slabs of freshwater eel) the ray went untouched, as did the mullet but the eel received plenty of attention with 3 runs with one hook up. The first run dropped the bait and didn’t come back, the second run was a solid hookup, drag started to scream but lazy old me didn’t put any wind on leader on…so as the shark turned and started to swim towards to boat, I reeled like crazy until I felt weight again and bang! With a solid whip of the tail he busted through my 40lb braid. Lost the shark and my cable trace…I won’t make that mistake again. 8pm rolls around and we get the 3^rd run, which resulted in a 1.13m bull which we tagged and released back. The tide changed around 11pm, so we got the baits in and waited for the slack tide to end before we floated the baits out again. 2 hours later the mullet goes off screaming off at a very fast pace (this was dodgy servo special frozen tweed mullet by the way) hooks set and we are in. The 24kg rod had a fairly good bend in it, wasn’t the most exciting of fights as we had it next to the boat within about 5 minutes. (Setup was a Penn Squall 60 with 50lb braid) Was a nice fat 5.8ft male bull shark. Circle hook did its job perfectly hooking right in the corner of its mouth which made for a super quick release, the faster the better in my opinion. We tried to tag this one as well but we didn’t have the right gear on board to puncture its skin (very tough skin to get a tag though!)

That was it for the night, we stayed until sun rise then we powered home for a sleep. Was kind of poetic, as we left the ramp the sun was setting, and as we came home the sun had just risen. The amount of weekend warriors at the ramp was nuts! Line up 6 deep with 3 on the ramp at any given time.

Lessons learnt form my first overnight trip