After my fairly poor showing (fish wise) in the bay over new years, we got back to Sydney and drove up to the Central Coast for a bit of a holiday with my family.
Nice secluded little area - little or no coverage on mobiles for the week...
Got to hang out with a few nieces and nephews and brothers and sisters.
Plenty of frosty ones, BBQ's, beach cricket, duck feedings, and a bit of fishing thrown in.
I don't have many photo's unfortunately. I think some of the mums took more...
We stayed in a sleepy little spot in Wagstaffe - which is just around the bay from where we spent every family holiday for some 27 years (Hardy's Bay).
Fishing mostly landbased, we picked up a few good feeds of the estuary mainstays - bream, whiting and flathead.
Luring action was a bit slow this year including the most frustrating whiting popper session of my life. Watching schools of 35cm fish and solitary 45 cm+ fish (other blokes were calling them 2 foot, but I'll be realistic...) cruise the flats but not a single follow. Other blokes fishing live nippers on the same flat further down were dragging in undersize bream hand over fist but not a sniff from the whiting either. I did pick up a couple of ting the previous morning and a good bream and plenty of tailor as well on the poppers.
Spent a bit more time than I have for many years fishing baits and helping put my nephews on to some fish. My nieces got a couple too, but no help needed from me.
Put a good few mornings in around 'Half Tide' for a few nasty visitors - eels and little sharks. Plenty of bust offs on the oyster encrusted rocks too.
Picked up a stack of cod around there as well - good size, smallest would have been 400mm. Shame they are protected, they look delicious! Interested to hear what Mick Baker has to say - we've never seen cod in those parts before. And the locals we spoke to have only started seeing them recently, and not in the numbers we seemed to find them.
A few pics anyway...