Fished the MAAC competition with delightful Sarah, my 10 year old Daughter on Saturday.  She has just become a “fully fledged” MAAC Junior and this was the first time it was just her and me on my small boat for a comp over 9 hours on the water.

Sarah was keen as mustard.  I spent a bit of Friday telling her about techniques and rigs and we happily made up all the stuff we would need.  I know she took it all in as she spent an hour or so explaining what we had done in great detail over facetime with one of her best friends.  She didn’t even bat an eyelid when I woke her up at 4.45am the next morning and hopped straight out of bed and got ready.  The ramp was relatively peaceful when we got there and we had no problem launching.  We were at the marina mouth at 6am which is the time you can leave.

The plan was to fish “Terry’s Pike Spot” for a few species, head south to a whiting hole, head south west to Hale Road Reef, out to “Whale Rock” and the “Beehive” and then fish the old coral heading north.  Nice and close for the little boat and all spots that had produced many times before.

What’s the old saying “no run no fun” and it was a glass off at 6am.  We couldn’t raise a fish off the pike spot so had to change plan to head to the nearshore reefs for the bread and butter species.  It was hard work there too but we did manage to land a few nice gar, amongst the blowies in the burley.  As the MAAC comp is all about the species not the quantity it was time to move on.  Our whiting spot was slow as well but we did get one each after a while – plus a couple of yellow tail for future bait.  Off to Hale Road with not a lot happening there either, except for a 45cm Dhu on a floater that was successfully released.  Out we go and those spots didn’t fare much better, except for a skippy that Sarah got.  Time to head north as the southern run only produced 2 species (3 for Sarah) with a fair amount of effort required to get them.

The northern spots weren’t much better but hopes were picking up as the westerly wind started to blow.  With no real luck at about 5 spots, it was time to pull the “red hunters”.  WTF, someone had surrounded my 2 pots with 3 of theirs – would have been lucky to be 50m between them all!  The ground the pots were on is a rather endless stretch of rocky stuff and I just sound it up (the Lowrance HDS9 Gen 2 with structure scan gives a very nice reading of the bottom) to pick the marks and have no real set ones.  Anyway, we pulled them and there were lots of crays although many were tar spot and/or berried females that needed to go back.  We did get 4 keepers however, with one nice big one.  Baited them up again and moved them away from the “bombing” they had received – onto equally suitable ground in the general area.

It was then I remembered that there was a spot not too far away that had extensive weed growth on it.  It’s only little but the Minn could hold us on top of it.  What do you know, the fish were there and hungry.  We then spent a nice couple of hours landing a size Dhu (3 more released), a blackass, a couple of KGs, a skippy, and a variety of other things - the absolute highlight was Sarah's first KG.  By the time we had to move on, I had 6 species and Sarah had 4 so we had something to show for our efforts.  It was a slow day however and we were thankful that 1 spot had produced.  We came in close and had a final try for herring, snook and tailor with no success.  Whilst we didn’t get a lot of fish, our bag was a very tasty one – even though you couldn’t weigh in the crays, foxfish of yellowtail.

At the weigh in there were mixed reports about the day.  Plenty of good fish landed by the seasoned MAAC Members but the reports were that it was generally patchy.  One thing that did emerge was that a lot of the fish were caught around the “bite time”, which I think was around noon-1pm.  This did coincide with the time that we got our fish so there is probably something in all of that.

Sarah’s 4 species and the weight of the fish were enough for her to win the Juniors for the day, and we also picked up the participation prize which is a carton.  After our names were called for this prize, Sarah came up and said what did “we” win, and it was ‘no, what did I win”.  She then hit me up for half of the carton cost in cash.

Sarah was an absolute pleasure to fish with.  She seemed to genuinely enjoy the day and was no trouble at all – although I do need to convince her that she should bait her own hooks.  It was one of those days that we will both look back on with fond memories, and look forward to the next one when hopefully the fish will play the game all day.