Bit slow with write up this year but as follows!

Early weather reports were Friday 21 May was a must fish day with some iffy weather coming, so brought forward the trip to Thursday night, drive through and fish Friday rather than first day Saturday. Myself, Stick and Barra headed up in the car with Tony to fly up (as only flew in Thursday night from site) Friday morning. After 30 years a trophy was finally on offer for best fisherman. Points system based on type of fish caught eg reds 5 points being max.

The trip started with a nice rock to the windscreen around Badgingarra, oh well, insurance job when we return, hiccup #1.

We safely got to Edaggee rest area camp grounds around 2am and given we couldn’t fish until ~ 10am when Tony arrived we decided to get a couple of hours shut eye and be partly refreshed for day 1 fishing. All good, few hours shut eye, arrived Coral Bay around 8.30am, only to find a message from Tony that the planes delayed and head out without him! Hiccup #2 (and thankfully last) we could have ben on the water already in near perfect conditions.

Without day by day accounts the fishing was slow in that we never had them "on the bite". Just ahd to work the spots, pick up 3-4 fish a spot and move on. It wasnt from alck of trying that's for sure. The pics can tell the story. Water temp was reading around 27 degrees and my experience is the fish shut down and again found this to be the case. Fished 7 of 8 days with some joint day efforts squidding.

We fished north, we fished south, we fished deep we fished shallow. We had easterlies, we had southerlies and we had northerlies! What was really interesting that the only common fish caught south vs north were spanglies and red throat. Sharks were annoying rather than plague proportions as a lot of people say! Still managed to find some new spots amongst it all. In saying that we worked hard for our fish and we got 10-15 fish per day and came home with ~ 17kg each. In addition we got over 5kg of squid each with them being around in huge numbers anywhere we looked.

Highlights were;
- Barra’s kebabs yet again, straight out of Plakas in Northbridge!
- Harry’s (other crew up there) beer battered fried crispy fish wings
- Matches ~ 8kg saddle tail
- Justins (other crew) bday party
- Free jumping and swimming marlin
- The pure hysteria of not being able to control squid ink being sprayed on you / my boat!

Lowlights
- Lack of big reds
- Don’t recommend drinking two bottles of baileys then fishing next day in sloppy conditions

For the record much to Matches disappointment he didn’t win the trophy, Tony did

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