With trout activity being a bit slow a number of members of the Illawarra Fly Fishing Club have turned to chasing pelagics off Port Kembla over recent weeks with outstanding success.
First into the fray was Claude Guala. He put Andrew Wheeler, Leo Harding and Stephen Chatterton in close contact with feeding schools and the action was hot and very fast. Takes were often very visible and in all cases were followed by line stripping multiple runs. There were also double and triple hook ups adding to the excitement and confusion. In the first couple of trips the group finished up with around 20 Australian Salmon weighing between 3-4 kg, Leo Harding boated one Striped Tuna of 4-5 kg and Stephen Chatterton boated two Southern Bluefin Tuna also of between 4-5 kg after coming unstuck on a couple of earlier vicious takes.
Building on this success Leo Harding and Chris Harding also took their boats out on Australia Day. Andrew was with Claude, Stephen with Leo and Peter Harding with Chris. At least 30 salmon were boated with the largest being measured at 64 cm and the average size being around 60 cm as well as around 8 or 10 bonito of up four kilos.
The fish were feeding on small baitfish of around 3-4 cm in length and size 2 Clouser, Deceiver and Sal-mar-mac type flies generally in white/blue and white/green combinations 'matched the hatch' pretty well. Interestingly there were a lot of spin fishers also working the schools earlier in the week but they were having very limited success and had basically given up by Saturday.
Stephen Chatterton