Sunday morning in the cold, dark and wet conditions I launched the boat at Hastings, Hastings is on the mid eastern side of Western Port so its conveniently smack in the middle of all the squid, the idea was to head straight to the deep south of Western Port in search of some of the early season breeders that can some times come into the port at this time of the year, we started the 35km boat trip in the absolute black of the morning at about 0500, all was going well running the boat at full noise until we stuck our heads around the corner at Sandy Point. We were met with a stiff south westerly blowing straight up the port, this combined with a fast outgoing tide caused the swell to build to around 3 meters at times with a 1/2 meter chop on the top. Suffice to say the the journey slowed down some what and what was supposed to be a 15 minute trip turned into a 45 minute job as I could not see the next swell coming, I headed closer to shore to get some protection and the trip was becoming more comfortable.
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| Lure stealing seal |
We made it to Flinders in the south of the port and searched for some nice water to start throwing egi around at, this proved difficult as with the rough conditions water clarity was all but gone. We found a small patch of semi clear water and started plugging away. We did it fairly tough without a look at a squid for almost an hour. Just as we were discussing a move I hooked up to a reasonable sized squid of 1.9kg not the giants we were looking for but put us on the board, another half hour of mucking around and we landed one small one of about 800g and decided to make the move back towards Hastings to fish a few banks of sea grass that are known to hold squid, again it was tough going but we found a few around that 1kg mark before decided to head north to Quail Bank. It was at Quail where things started to look up, we found a good patch of squid in about 4 meters and kept plugging away at them for a few hours. It was here we saw our biggest for the day, if landed would have been an easy 2.5kg, however a friendly seal made short work of both the squid and the egi (DOH)
My mate Dan and I had landed a nice bag of squid keeping 10 for the table. Most productive egi on the day for me was the Gan Craft Egi-Jya 3.5 in Sunset Kuroshio and for Dan was Gan Craft Egi-Jya 3.5 Olive Le Kuroshio, a notible mention also to the color Black tiger as pictured below hanging off the squid in the water. We both had a ball but was a tough day in the end with the early conditions not helping. The wind ended up clearing in the north end of the port for a perfect setting and a perfect drift of about 0.5kph, the water mirrored out and the water cleared up. Sizes are on the increase as the season progresses but still no sign of the big big big squid we hope to find soon.
