Hervey Bay - 7th November 2009
Muz & I ended up heading up to Hervey Bay last weekend. Picked him up at 12.30am Saturday morning and with a coffee stop along the way were on the water at the Boat Harbour just after 5.30am. Saw our first Tuna bustup about 10 minutes later. There were a number of schools of Mack Tuna but they were pretty hard to get close enough to get a cast into them before they went down This was to be the norm for the day. After being frustrated for an hour or so went over to Moon Point and caught up with Jon & Taz who had just been dropped on the beach by Ezra. With the sun out intermittently we left them for a search over the flats without much luck other than dropping a Queeny which was causing havoc with the abundant supply of bait. Decided then to head up to the Arch Cliff area to see if we could find some more accomodating Tuna. Weather was a little lumpy with a 15 knot ESE breeze but with the shelter of Fraser it was not to bad. Got to the Arches around 9.00am to be greeted by numerous schools of Mack Tuna with the odd Longtail mixed in with them. For the most part they were just as finicky as the earlier ones. After trying plenty of different flies we finally started having some success with tiny candies about 40-50mm long.I had not seen macks this big before and when we were able to get close enough to get a cast into the mosh pit we normally got a hookup. We ended up dropping a few but we did end up getting 5 between us and they were big buggers. All were about 80cm long, probably around 8 kg and a hell of a lot of fun. Early afternoon the wind started to pick up more and with the long drive home ahead of us we were back at the ramp loaded the boat and on the way home by about 3.30pm arriving back at Muz's place at 8.30pm. After 10 hours driving and 10 hours on the boat we were both looking forward to a sleep. It was a long, long way to go for 1 day and I doubt I would do it again but it sure was great fun.
