It has been a while since I’ve last gone fishing, mainly due to some pretty ordinary weather, and not wanting to battle with the weekend crowds. I decided to head up to Harry’s this morning for a little poke around, I wasn’t really feeling it though, it was pretty lumpy at 5:30am, slow trip out there, and with the breeze, I was all but freezing, Harry’s was stale, tried a few spots, did some drifts, to no result though, the wind was backing off at around 10am, so thought I’d give the West Peel artificial a go, I haven’t fished it properly before, have always just scooted through it, so I spent a little time sounding around until I found some likely looking ground, I worked the soft plastics pretty hard and eventually ended up nailing a 50cm grinner, dear me, things were not looking good, I knocked some fillets off him and put him to work on a running ball rig with a 7 0 hook, I didn’t take any bait out with me this morning, and was planning on only using plastics, I continued flicking around as my rod holder was taking care of the grinner fillet, I could see in the corner of my eye he was getting touched up by pickers, until all hell broke loose and line started disappearing, I’ll admit, first thought was a shark as it took off in the direction of Coochie, then came the head shakes, oh could it be I was thinking?,he had plenty of go in him and kept me pretty honest on the light gear, he fought the whole way back to the boat.
Considering I managed to leave my landing net at home, I was lucky to get him in the boat, I had to resort to an unorthodox method of using the square bucket that’s in the pic, it wasn’t pretty, but I pulled it off.
Having fought so hard considering his size, I decided he wanted to live more then I wanted fillets, so after the pic I gave him a little swim and off he went, the plastics didn’t end up firing and all I got after him was a shark around the metre mark on another chunk of grinner, the wind dropped off completely and made for a nice run back to the ramp, turned out to be a pretty good day really.
