It’s been a long time coming but well worth the wait. I’ve recently returned from a week-long adventure to a pretty remote part of New Caledonia and one I expect we’ll be hearing more and more about in the future… Poindimie!

Located well into the north province on the east coast of Grand Terre, the fishing available here is bound to get big GT anglers and the vertical jigging guys very excited, as well as the bluewater anglers who want to add wahoo, Spanish mackeral, mahi mahi, yellowfin and doggies into the equation.

Tieti Tera resort in Poindimie ticked all the boxes, and for most people a week around the pool and beach would have been more than enough. Not so for our well-prepared group, who arrived with a race face and carrying rod tubes and an arsenal of poppers and jigs.

With so much potential in a place it’s hard to decide where to start fishing sometimes. A look over the charts of this area showed a maze of outer reefs and passages dotted with seamounts and islets, all spread over a vast area. Fortunately our skipper really knows his way around these waters and knows which are the GT reefs, the coral trout reefs, the doggie reefs, the light tackle areas etc etc. Handy stuff!

Our first mission on day 1 was for big GT’s on the reef fringes. As GT’s and New Cal go hand in hand, it wasn’t a hard decision!

My fishing companion for the week was Rob Chang, a Singapore based angler who has chased GT’s on regular trips to the Maldives and Indonesia. Rob put on a surface stickbait to warm up on. I chose the not so subtle approach, and wanting to announce my arrival to all north east coast GT’s I attached an Ebipop 140 popper and let the first few casts go. With very little swell or breeze around, the conditions were perfect.

Rob got the first runs on the board with a nice GT pup of about 15kg… I persisted with the big blooper and Rob got back into the action with the River2Sea Rover 230 stickbait, he went on to land a 25kg GT and then another 30kg specimen.

Rob’s next fish was a real bruiser; a bucket-mouthed monster that had him stretched, coming in at just over 50kg. The video footage of the action is awesome! Understandably, Rob was thrilled.

Rob had 4 GTs, with zero for me ( not including 1 reef shark which ate and broke one of my Ebipops). It was time for me to change lures… I rigged the River2Sea Rover 230 (this time in blue mackeral) my skipper Etienne had earlier recommended to Rob. No more than 4 casts later and I got my first GT of the trip, around 15kg. We continued along the reef casting towards the shallows and structure. My stickbait landed some distance away and I began another slow jerky retrieve. Then, as if in slow motion, I saw a big GT erupt and hit the lure side on, its body was almost completely out of the water. This was a good fish and I was loaded up with more drag than I’d ever used before. The skipper drove the boat into deeper water for me to do battle with a solid winter GT. It was a tough battle with the fish using the current and its deep body side on to its advantage, and the Illex GT rod performed fantastically, absorbing the bulk of the fish’s efforts to bury me in the coral. I managed to hold my own and do well enough to get her alongside, and the skipper and deck hand carefully lift the 40kg fish into the boat, I’m spent!

So what was going to be a brief recount of the week has turned into a novel about the first days GT fishing. I’ll stop here and try to get on to the other days action (reef, jigging, casting, bluewater) at a later stage.

Poindimie….. simply awesome!

Cheers Dave