Kingfish, kingfish, kingfish. Yellowtail kingfish have been the hot topic and the focus of east coast anglers: they are a great fighting fish and excellent eating as well.
Whilst there are some schools of kingfish in Georges Bay with a handful of anglers catching quite a few fish up to 2.5kg, the bulk of the fish have been caught around Elephant Rock and have provided some great sport fishing.
Various methods have proven to be successful and for those anglers serious about targeting this species a combination of those methods are often needed to bring the fish to the boat.
High speed trolling using lures such as Rapala X-Raps trolled at speeds of between 10-15knots or using knife jigs of 80-150g to jig the fish up have both worked well once the schools of kingfish have been located with a sounder.
Once the fish are brought up to the boat and are visible in schools near the surface large soft plastic lures such as Squidgy Pro Range Flick Baits in 110mm and 145mm in Pearl, Evil Minnow and Slimey colours have proven to be unbeatable.
One recent session around Elephant Rock by a group of four anglers saw over 50 yellowtail kingfish caught and released all between 2-4kg using a combination of all three methods mentioned above.
Remember that the new possession limit for kingfish is five fish: limit your kill don’t kill your limit.
Offshore the action is starting to hot up, with temperatures outside the shelf reaching 21.8C and inshore temps at over 19C. It is only time until some large fish are boated. Reports of large schools of small striped tuna are everywhere as well as small albacore.
During the last couple of weeks a number of striped marlin sightings have been reported, both inshore and out wide. Recently Rocky Carosi of Professional Charters lost a marlin estimated at over 100kg after being hooked up for over an hour.
April is the time for some absolute cracker bream. Many of the east coast systems have been producing excellent numbers and sizes of black bream and at this time of year the flats fishing with hardbodied lures is just superb.
One recent outing by a number of young anglers with Micheal Haley of Gone Fishing Charters caught some of the best bream of the season so far with the largest fish coming in at 48cm to the fork.
By the end of the session they had caught a large number of fish for the day, all of which were released, with the biggest 10 all being over 45cm to the fork.
Fish were caught in deeper water on 100mm Squidgy Wrigglers and once the tide was up on the flats with Bushy Stiffy lures in Tassie Tiger.
With Easter coming up the water ways around St Helens will be busy with the garfish coming on hot. For the next few months we should see some top gar action with fish averaging 450-500mm in length.
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Yellowtail kingfish are the hot topic at the moment, and no wonder with quality fish like this.
If you can find better bream than this I’d be surprised. This thumper was 48cm to the fork, and was safely released.
