Good weather producing some great (and unusual) catches

THE good weather produced some great catches over the last long weekend.

Sunday was the best day with plenty of reef fish, pelagics and even barra caught.

There were some great barra landed at the mouth of Sampan creek on the Mary River with reports of at least a couple over the metre mark which is unusual for this time of year.

Apparently with the calm weather the water cleared up beautifully at the mouth allowing anglers trolling shallow diving bomber lures to get onto a few along with some good threadfin salmon as well.

Many boats also made the trip up to the Melville Island with some staying overnight.

A few good barra were landed in the creeks but the best fishing was offshore where there were plenty of schools of marauding queenfish and trevally on the chew.

Some boats experienced plenty of double and even triple hook-ups on these voraciously feeding pelagics.

There was even the odd Spanish mackerel in among them if you could get your lure past the trevally!

Dundee also fished well and Sunday was particularly good with flat calm seas for most of the day.

One mate of mine fished out very wide off Dundee with his family and ended up having the best session of his life on red emperor landing 18 of them in one morning session with the biggest measuring about 70cm.

They also landed plenty of good coral trout and Saddletail snapper in about 30m of water.

Another friend of mine, Kurt Williamson fishing with his partner Bron also headed out wide recently off Dundee and landed a few sailfish along with some nice reef fish.

Kurt said: “You couldn’t have asked for better weather. The tide was good and I finally had the day off work so it wasn’t too hard of a decision to put the boat in at Dundee.

“We headed out wide to some grounds to target billfish. We soon found some bait balls and within minutes angry sails appeared in the spread! It was a hot two hour bite then they went quiet at the flick of a switch.

“Noticing a lot of bottom fish on the sounder, Bron asked if we could try to catch some. With no sinkers or bait we tied a blade jig on with a soft plastic sitting a foot above it too. Not knowing what was down there it looked like it would work. First drop and it was a on!

“Giving me grief on 30lb braid my spin reel was struggling. Bron landed hers first and it was a thumper Saddletail snapper!

“I finally landed mine a few minutes later and it was a nice Chinaman cod known for their fighting prowess. After a few more drops, the Esky looked good with plenty of red fish inside.

“Calling it a day we watched beautiful humpback whales breaching around us just to top it off on our way back in.”