Port Macquarie ABT

[goob]

Hi guys, fished the Port bream touney a couple weekends ago, had agreat time and met some top people. was lucky enough to have free accom as my parents live there, so i turned up a couple of days early and the old man broke out the home brew- ouch!! pre fish day came around and i took the old man's tinnie out with one of his next door neighbors to try and learn a bit of inside knowledge, and got a bag of 5 early, you beauty!
headed home early so we didn't sting them too much and what to do??? walk down the back yard and have a fish of course. started throwin around a damiki vault vibe and had a couple of little bumps before somthin grabbed it and took off. using 4lb i had to chase it down the riverbank, wading out around some mangroves before up swam this little beauty, [/IMG] [/IMG]
up early next morning and met my boater at the caravan park for the run down to the starting point, it was so cold it was bloody hard to cast for the first half hour as i couldn't feel my fingers. we headed over to some shallow weedy flats with a good channel down one bank that has some racks down it where i got a few in the pre-fish. we threw everything at them , softies, hard bodz and poppers, and caught heaps of fish, only problem was they were undersized bream with some trevally and flatties thrown in for variety. i had the hooks pull on what felt like some solid fish, they were very tentative bites and i think they were only getting very lightly lip hooked. my boater pulled a very nice little 32cm model out from under a rack, then as the tide turned the bite shut down, so off we went to some deeper water to fish some softies down deep.
we worked some deep rock walls and under some moored boats and pulled some very nice flatties out but no more bream for day one (pics of the flatties comin, havin some trouble gettin them off the camera).
after i got home dad asked if i was keen to chuck some poppers around the flats out the back, stupid question. we got a couple decent whiting and a dirty great longtom that put on a great show before it took my favourite popper home, b@#tard!!!! [/IMG]
day 2 and i met my boater again and away we went. we headed straight to the deep rockwall and weren't alone, there was about 8 boats working along the wall. we each pulled a couple of just under legals and decided to move after about an hour. down to a deep mussle bed where we spent a few hours for not a lot other than some small flatties and 2 undersized bream. i was fishing 4lb flourocarbon straight through and dizzy borg was fishing just up from us, he couldn't get a touch on 4lb either, only on 2lb could he get a bite ( mental note for next tourney, rig one or two of my rods with 2lb aswell ) we did a lot of moving after lunch trying to find some larger fish but all we seemed to come across were flatties, they were everywhere. the guys who did well were the guys who stayed put and fished a good looking stretch all day, instead of running all over the place. the worst thing about being a non-boater is having vitually no say in where and how you fish for the day, i heard some horror stories at the end of the comp from other n/b's, i guess i got lucky, the guys i fished with were top knotch and we had a great time on both days. pity we couldn'd hit the fish with a rolling pin to stretch them out that little bit to get them over the line, but that's fishin will try to get the rest of the pics up on the weekend.
cheers clint

[ffejsmada]

Good work Clint, Those whiting on pops are a good effort for the middle of winter. That little noah would've gone alright on 4lb, top job getting him in........and lucky too that he didn't use his scissors.

Cheers Jeff.

[goob]

yeah, i got a little concerned as i was wadin out around thigh deep around some of the mangroves, would have been interesting if he came up to have a go at me , as for the whiting, it's not all that hard to stir a couple up there, the flats at the back on the oldies place is full of whiting and mullet, mum chucks all her stale bread out to 'em

[Nath86]

Hey Clint.
Just out of curiousity, what type of shark is it? Bullshark?
And definately an amazzing effort on 4lb - well done.

Yet to really give poppers a shot on the smaller species such as the whiting and bream, but I've been meaning too for some time. Do find that any stand above the rest?

Cheers Nath

[goob]

yeah nath, it's a little bullshark, and as for the poppers, i've had the most success with the strike-pro "rack poppers" , the red one in the pic and the clear with the red eyes, (sorry, i don't know the names of the colours). the whiting love the red and the bream go nuts for the clear.
here's some of the photo's from the trip, still havin trouble with the downloading the photos from the camera.
[/IMG]the accomodation,
a ittle blackfish that doesn't know they're not supposed to hit lures, [/IMG]
and some flatties.. [/IMG][/IMG][/IMG]