We weren’t expecting much activity till the current dropped and sure enough when it did drop I hooked into a nice eating size Snapper. I caught it on my smaller rod which had a standard dropper rig, using small hooks and small strips of squid bait. Around this same time my brother caught a nice small size Kahawai, by accident, after leaving his hook just over the side of the boat. We didn’t catch anything when the current dropped completely however we did see lots of fish sign at around 12m and this looked like some sort of fish school, however when we did put our lines to this depth we never caught any fish nor did we get any bites. There were some very large trees in the water floating around so I wonder if maybe this was just larger sticks floating around at this depth.

Kapiti Snapper

Once the current started to head north, from the incoming tide, we got more activity. I caught another Snapper the same size as the last one and also I caught another Kahawai. The Snapper this time was caught on my larger rod, which was equip with a Snapper Rig with a large squid tentacle on it.

We didn’t get any action for another hour or so and our lines started to lift higher in the water due to the increase in current. My brother was dealing with one of his lines when suddenly his larger rod bent over quite dramatically. This line wasn’t hugely deep and so he saw that he had caught a Thresher Shark winding his line up a little. He could tell it was due to its large thresher tail. We had to pull in all our lines quickly and also take an ore off our small 8ft Zodiac Boat to prevent the shark from biting into a pontoon or its tail hitting us. Because my brother had 80lb line on he could fight it a little, however we weren’t too happy about bringing this shark too close to the boat so we didn’t try to land it. It wasn’t long before the shark wrapped itself around the anchor and it snapped the line. Unfortunately the camera didn’t take the photo early enough and therefore I couldn’t get a photo of the shark.

to slow to capture the shark

This wasn’t a huge shark, it probably would have gone 3 – 5 ft however its tail was quite a sight as it hit the water. We kept fishing here for a while however nothing more was caught and also there were quite a few boats starting to join this spot so we tried a little shallower at the 20m mark. We didn’t catch anything at this depth however there was again quite a bit of sign on the fish finder.

fish sign

Doing some more tests we went to a depth of 50m in the channel. However there was no sign at all on the fish finder at this depth and after about 30mins we gave up and went to a depth of 30m. At about this time the wind changed from calm southerly to a strengthening north westerly which chopped up the water. It didn’t take us long to catch a really large Kahawai (which we released) and straight after a nice size Gurnard (the first for this summer season). We decided to head in as the wind picked up and what was a nice day turned into a choppy mess (though the fish were still biting, we had enough fish for dinner).

So it was a good day fishing, some interesting things we found was that a good fishing depth was the 25m – 30m mark. We found that at 20m we didn’t catch anything though there was still quite a bit of sign around. At 25m we saw lots of fish sign at about 12m however we aren’t sure what this was, perhaps it was a shark? Or maybe just wood in the water? Either way it was a fun day and glad to catch a good range of fish…