It was during a recent flight back from one of our mine sites that I was seated next to Luke.  I met Luke about six years ago whilst living in Kalgoorlie and we have managed to maintain a casual friendship, mainly as we share a common passion – fishing.  Our 90-minute flight back to Perth was unsurprisingly absorbed by discussing fishing.  During our discussion Luke mentioned that he was keen to get offshore as most of his fishing to date was land based.  When I arrived home I checked WillyWeather and noticed that Saturday was going to be a good day to be out with light winds and a moderate swell.  I sent Luke a text inviting him to join me and soon received one back confirming his attendance.

We met at Woodman Point early the Saturday morning and as the first light was appearing on the horizon we were making our way across Cockburn Sound.  We stopped off between Garden and Carnac Island to try for early morning Snapper and to witness another spectacular WA sunrise.  After about an hour of no queries we made the decision to make our way towards Rottnest Island.  The water was relatively flat which allowed us to cover the remaining 25km in about 35 minutes.

Once at Rotto we surveyed the various bommies before we chose our drift line and with the wind gently pushing the Cruise Craft along, we did a couple of drifts over promising looking ground.  Luke managed an undersized Dhufish and also landed his PB Breaksea Cod in the process.  He also got smashed by a good fish which I put down to tackle failure.  After three drifts and witnessing a couple of whales surfacing between the boat and the island, we decided to drop the anchor and burley.   We had found a promising looking structure in about 20m where the Raymarine confirmed a couple of decent looking arches.

When I dropped the burley cage into the water, it came up almost horizontal behind the boat which meant that there was a heavy current pushing through.  This prompted us to upgrade our weightless traces to traces with large No 8 sized barrel sinkers in order to get the bait down into the zone where the fish were holding. This was completely against my grain as I normally try and fish as light as possible.   

It did not take Luke long to land his first ever Kingie and went on to catch three for the day – not bad going!   In the mean time I got smashed three times before deciding to bring out the “big gun” loaded with 50lb braid.  Once I had my bait down in the swim it was literally seconds and I was on.  This YTK was not going to get away this time.  When the fish eventually showed its number plate, it turned out to be a Snapper of about 70cm.  Now don’t get me wrong, I will be glad to catch Snapper any day of the week, but I wanted a YTK. With renewed determination a fresh bait was loaded and almost immediately - bang into another fish – this time with decent headshakes.  Was this to be my YTK?  Once again when the fish showed its colours it turned out to be another Snapper – this time around the 80cm mark.  Oh well, beggars can’t be choosers.

With the Snapper now in the swim, I tried to get Luke into a specimen, but after about 45 minutes we had to lift the pick to head back in.  The wind was starting to pick up, we had fish to clean and I had tickets to watch the Springboks play the Wallabies at the NIB Stadium.  I could easily have given up the tickets, but the missus would probably not be as forgiving.

A great result for a relatively short session.  Even though I did not bag my YTK, I really enjoyed seeing Luke have a great session.  It seems that I may have a new partner on the boat.

YouTube clip

https://youtu.be/kwT0Bgaitj4

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