December 17th, 2010 | By Ocean Blue
Last month’s Tauranga trip saw a great group of Ocean Blue Club members, Modern Fishing journo Jack Scrine and myself head over to NZ for a week of great sportfishing! It sure did live up to it’s name, Bay of Plenty, with schools of kingfish working the surface en masse, varying from mid size, big to bloody massive! Modern Fishing will run this feature early in the New Year and having already seen some of Jack’s awesome photos and spellign, I’m excited to see the finished product!!
I’ll let the photo’s do most of the talking, we all caught plenty of quantity and quality fish, and had a blast of a trip which will stay with us for a very long time. Flying direct now into Roturua is damn easy while staying at the Sebel with it’s own pier is so convenient, comfortable and very affordable. Tauranga has a great range of restaurants, bars, fish and chip shops and good cafes to keep the social comforts and options open.
We fished 7 people on 2 boats comfortably and spent the whole time in the same area, maintaining radio contact for sharing regular updates for fish won and lost, plus some good natured slanging also – it’s all part of the sport! I’ve got enough clasisc video footage for 3 videos – mad stikes, packs of 20kg fish following the stickbait all the way to the boat, huge bust ups and boils on the surface (kings smashing bait etc), screaming drags and rods buckled… Watch this space or our YouTube channel for this footage…
I have to say this fishery is sensational and what Mark is doing over there (single handedly pioneering kingfish on stickbaits) it’s great to see something this fresh and exciting taking off…
Top stickbaits for the week were Global Tackle’s new range of Angel lures – which stood up really well to plenty of big hits and big fish. The Orion’s Numbas, Crazy Dog (particularly anything with white), FCL squidpens, Adhek Gobys, Baby Runboh all went well. I had a 12inch Sluggo soft plastic in squid colour last a few seconds before getting smashed by a 17kg torpedo. Multiple hookups were the norm, at one stage the guys had a triple hook up on Saltwater fly, topwater Stickbait and a Jig.
On day 3 I laid down a silly 20lb light gear challenge, Colin set the pace with a 15kg kingy on his snapper outfit (landed in 15 min) while I got tied up to a stubborn fish for an hour long slog to land an 18kg fish on a 7inch Gulp, Certate 3500 and TCurve Powerspin rod, totally stoked. Peter Childs also landed a 15kg kingy on the humble snapper gear, and I think the whole crew found the light tackle stuff for trevally, kahawai, snapper and kings an absolute blast, and an unexpected bonus on top of the topwater kingfish focus.
Thanks again to all involved; Peter Childs, Andrew Pennisi, Brendan Coote, Justin Ayres, Wahyu Kasumanjaya, Modern Fishing’s Jack Scrine, skippers Mark, Colin and the team.
Cheers, David Noble
