St Helens 17/2/2013
Shippy gave me a ring to see if I would like to come tuna fishing at St Helens along with with Andrew and Evan. We left Launceston at 3.30am on Saturday morning arriving at St Helens about 5.30.
We headed to the shelf, got to the 100 meter mark and the rods went off, a nice albacore about 6kg. Start up, rods went off again, 2 more, moved a bit further 3 more, then 3 more we had 10 by 8 o'clock,... good morning so far .
We were on the shelf trolling around (not a touch), so we headed back in got to the 100 meter mark, rods went off 3 more.
In the end they kept going off and we had about 20 tuna.
Decided to head in to do some bottom bouncing (we were in about 65 metres of water), Andrew got a nice big flathead I got a gurnard then he got an arrow squid.
We ended up with 2 more squid and 2 more gurnard. While were bottom bouncing Craig decided to fillet the tuna throwing frames in as he went, we looked out the back and there was a mako shark swimming around so Evan dropped a trace with a squid head hooked onto it .
He swam up to it and ate it straight away, didn’t even know he was hooked. Craig started the motor up and tightened up on him, ... then the fun began !
Evan battled him for about half an hour, got him to the boat, we put a tail rope on him.
He thrashed around till Evan cut the back of his head, he weighed 70kg.
Good day,... I like shark better than tuna
Regards,
Derek
