A couple of weekends ago we had a lovely Sunday with a slight northerly blowing.  The next day Monday turned into one of the most savage northerlies I ever seen, wind speed in the 40’s with gusts to 60 knots and horizontal rain.  Looking out my window I could see ‘willy waws’ all over the white water bay…not nice.  You might remember this particular Monday, a very low depression went by and the lights of Auckland went out.   Anyway back to the day before all this wind and rain.  Fish can pick up on low depressions as they head to NZ from the west.  The weather here is still reasonably calm, but once the fish sense the oncoming depression, they decide that they might not be able to get a decent feed over the time the depression is passing so they eat up large.  That Sunday was such as day.  The perfect time to go fishing.  It was a bad day on the Billy Ho calendar; the bite was around the 11am mark.  I wasn’t intending to go fishing that day, but two old fishing mates turned up out of the blue, and of course the talk got round to fishing, and the offer made to go out.  I took a quick squiz at the weather map to see this enormous depression due to hit early Monday morning, took another look at the nice calm bay and told the boys we’d probably do OK.  We arrived at one of my secret spots and dropped the old wobbly berley pot over the side.  The current was moving quite nicely and the bite time was only minutes away.  My mates, Bill and Terry are basically legends in their specialist fishing field of rockhopping, they have caught their share of 9kg plus snapper all around the country.  They don’t fish out of boats very often, let along use 6kg line with no trace.  So they had an enlightening fishing experience that day.  The big snapper started to run and speedballing was the way to catch them.  Bill rigged up his gear with two heavy ball sinkers and was getting his bait chewed off by the pickers.  I managed to get him to take the sinkers off and try fishing with just one small ball sinker above his hook, no trace.  He did that, and let his line run off with the current.  It takes about a minute or so for the bait to get near the bottom as it sails down toward the bottom after it’s released.  After a minute went by Bill said he couldn’t feel his bait hitting the bottom.  I told him just wait a few more moments and just jet the line peel of the reel.  I didn’t ever take old Bill as an impatient fisherman, but he wanted to ‘feel’ his weight hit the bottom and feel that as soon as possible after he released the reel.   “I can’t feel the bottom Bill”, he said, “I’m winding it in and I’m going to put heavier sinkers on”.  He turned the reels’ handle just once when the fish in the photograph took his bait.  Terry hooked up at the same time as well.  Bill started to fight the fish.  His first reaction was to lock up the reel’s drag and winch the fish up.  I suggested he might like to release the drag a bit, as it was only 6kg line.  He did that and the fish peeled off line, so he put his thumb on the spool to stop the fish from running.  I suggested he might like to take his thumb off the spool, because he was just creating more pressure on the line and increasing the chances of the fish busting off.  The fish arrived at the boat after a good work out and Bill was thrilled.  After about 3 good fish he got the hang of the speedballing system of light line and light sinkers.  Now one of the interesting things that happened that afternoon was I caught a decent snapper of about 5kgs.  The thing was it had a flasher rig hook still lodged in the corner of its mouth.  Attached to the hook was a fair amount of line, all twisted up and tangled.  Attached to all that line were two sinkers.  You can see the rig in the picture above.  The whole rig looked like it had been lost to the fish about 2 or three months previously.  That poor old fish had had to lug that whole rig around hanging from its jaw for that amount of time.  This brings me to a point.  I like to use hooks that rust.  Some hooks are made from non rust metals and by the look at the hook I took out of this snapper’s mouth its in the latter category.  Another point is barbless hooks.  People can catch fish just as efficiently with barbless hooks as they can with barbed hooks.  The barbs just need to be squashed with a pair of pliers.  The only thing you need to watch is keeping the weight on the fish.  But people do this anyway.  So by using barbless hooks, if the fish is busted off or otherwise lost, the hook at least has a chance of dislodging from the fish’s mouth, where as with a barbed hook it has no chance as seen by the gear I took for the fish’s mouth above.  The only was that hook could be released is if it rusted and broke off.  The rig was a dropper type rig and these are a rig that is basically a one- piece complete rig, two hooks tied into a trace with sinkers tied in below the hooks.  With running sinker rigs if the line breaks, the sinker will come off the line, so at least the fish only has to wear a hook rather than hooks, line and sinker.  Something to think about?

The Inox Fishing shows start on Triangle TV on Friday 30th June, and also on Sky 90 from the week beginning 3rd July its on several times but the main show is on Thursdays at 8.30pm.  Lots of fishing and fishing ideas again to watch. The first show is about a Camp Ho we did at a place called Herbertville out from Dannevirke.

My mate Bill, or Ongo Bongo as he's nick named by my old fishing club back in the 70's