A Quick Little Garfish Session

After few discussions about last weeks sensational Squid fishing, my dad was dead keen to head to the coast for some action. Whilst he doesn’t mind a feed of Calamari now and again he had been drilling me about the Garfish situation and how that was faring in Georges Bay.
The winter months, as a matter of fact anywhere from April to September, are prime time in St Helens for Garfish and the reports I had been hearing over the last few weeks of plentiful catches and big gars had me and the old man ready for a session.

The boat was loaded and gear readied, light rods, light braid, small floats and size 10 long shank hooks, plenty of Berley and oil and some bits of Squid tentacle from last weekends catch for bait.
We launched and quickly anchored in between two of the red channel markers on the southern side of the channel leading out to the barway, just under Akaroa. This is always a prime spot for some Garfishing and with a couple of boats already lined up and catching fish we knew we were in for some action.
We anchored up, quickly got a berley trail going then sent out our rigs behind the boat in amongst the trail of berley particles and oil. It didn’t take long for a school of decent Garfish to appear behind the boat and we watched in anticipation as our quill floats slid silently under the water…..quick strike with the slow action soft rod and we were into some decent fish.
This action continued for about an hour or so until we had a decent feed soaking in the salt water ice slurry in the esky, not too greedy as we only needed a dozen or so fish each and that was plenty for our immediate needs. A quick clean up of the boat, we pulled all the fish out of the ice and ran a few fine fillets off them, the fish being in the ice slurry made this task cold but a lot easier to fillet them.
Once this was done we figured we may as well have a few drifts around with some soft plastics and see if we could hook up to a couple of Silver Trevally for a bit of sport. It didn’t take long as we drifted down the middle of the channel to find a school of fish and at one stage we had a double hookup of nice sized Trevally leading us around and around the boat…….great fun.
All that was required for this little session was a couple of nice soft action bait rods with light braid, a quill float some size 10 long shank hooks and small pieces of squid as bait for the Garfish, and of course some type of berley and fish oil to attract them, and a couple of soft plastic rods loaded with some light braid, a 1/16thoz jig head and some Strike Tiger 3” Grubtail plastics for the Trevally……great little session, fun times and a feed at the end of the day, what more do you want.

 

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