First of all I must apologize for my lack of blogging its been a massive month for me at work and time has been a premium, this is the longest my boat has sat still since buying it and I feel guilty for not giving her a run, however, a week ago I had a small window of opportunity with both the wind and work so I managed to grab my mate Dan and go in search of some squid down south.We launched at my normal haunt in Hastings and made the 30 km trip down south in search of some bigger model squid that we had not had a real crack at for a few weeks, I have been avoiding boat ramps because of snapper season mayhem.
The morning started off nice with a light 5 knot south westerly blowing, that was until we got down past sandy point and the wind picked up a bit, conditions were not great but they were far from a deterrent and it was still comfortable. We got to our spot and no one else was in sight so I thought I would do some sounding around for some bigger fish that I will be soon chasing with my jigging gear in the deeper water around my squid spot, some very impressive and promising marks appeared on the sounder but I knew the conditions were not yet right for these fish to be on the bite yet so after marking a few isolated bits of reef I ventured over to my squid spot.It did not take long for things to fire up, the first drift produced a few squid but nothing that I was overly impressed with, we did a few more drifts and although we landed a couple of squid things were far from exciting, I decided to take a deeper drift line, this is where things got better. We managed to pick up 5 in one drift all weighing in over 1.8kg and one that was just short of 2.8kg. It had been a while since a squid had pulled 3kg of drag off me and this one took about 20 meters.
We had a bag of squid so I decided that we needed to have a look offshore for some of the squid that inhabit the close reef structures near the penguin parade, conditions had picked up to about 15-20 knots SW and we could only get to within about 80 meters of the shore without getting involved with the breakers that some surfers seemed to be enjoying. We had no luck on the squid but a few of our UO-JYA egi received the fatal blow of the many pike and couta in the area. Time to pack things up and head back inside.
With the wind picking up from the south west we decided to head over towards Flinders for a quick look as we would have a little shelter from the winds. Things were pretty quiet in Flinders so we called it a day.
Back home just after lunch with a nice bag of squid for Dan to take home for a feed, we did let some of the breeding stock go as these guys were not ready to die yet and had heaps of life left in them.
