Manukau / Auckland West Coast
fishing report
March 19, 2020
I was asked to skipper a boat for a friend last weekend so he and his mate Matthew and I could fish the Waiau Pa Boating Club Family fishing competition. Although Grant owns a boat he is in a wheel chair and needs some assistance. He is a pretty forthright sort of character and is a very interesting guy so I felt the pressure to put him onto some good fish. They were keen to learn some new techniques as their normal fishing style is to drop flasher rigs under the boat and fish in deeper water. Effective but sometimes you need a plan B. They catch fish but wanted to try something else. That’s a very important part of fishing for me as there is no one approach that always works. Grant & Matthew recognised that were keen to learn.
Our strategy was to fish the slack water around low tide in the shallows.
We didn’t fish any deeper than 5m all day and I will often fish even shallower than that at this time of the year. My rig of choice is light line, in this instance 10lb braid with a 20lb leader. A one ounce sinker sliding down on to a 8/0 circle hook completes the setup.
We used a mixture of big and small baits and while both worked well I changed to smaller baits to tempt trevally and also to preserve our limited bait stocks. We all used similar gear with the same terminal tackle.
The big hooks help make the small fish more manageable by eliminating gut hooked undersized fish and if there weren’t so many small snapper in the mix I would have reduced hook size to 4/0 to improve the trevally catch.
While the ever present red weed made things challenging we managed 14 very nice snapper up to 11lb and two trevally.
Throw in 3 rat kings and it was a pretty full on day until the tide started to run strongly and after 11.00am the red weed made fishing a bit of a chore and we didn’t catch a fish after that.
My 4.9kg fish wasn't big enough for the two snapper prizes that were up for grabs so there are some nice snapper around and Matthew got his biggest harbour snapper at 46cm while Grant got his PB from the Big Muddy at 51cm weighing in at 2.6kg.
Both my crew were really surprised at the result and were probably a little sceptical to start with expecting to catch nothing but goldfish in the shallow water.
Most Manukau fishermen seem to prefer fishing deep water using heavy gear and big sinkers but I much prefer to fish light whenever I can. Apart from anything else it’s more fun. As an alternative to baits, curly tail softbaits and slider type jigs should also work well in the shallows.
Don’t for one minute think that the cooler weather will drive snapper out of the harbour, now is the time when the fish are at their best and there will most likely be at least a couple more months of great snapper fishing both inside and outside the harbour.
Meanwhile over the coast, snapper and gurnard are being caught from right in close out to 30m and it’s always best to fish from an anchored boat out there as without structure to hold fish it’s best to draw them to you.
Tuna are in close but marlin catches appear to be down on previous seasons but they will still be about.
Good luck out there and stay safe.
Smudge.
This Manukau / Auckland west coast report is supplied by Michael "Smudge" Parker and supports the Counties Sportfishing Club
For more information on the Counties Sportfishing Club visit its website here.
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