3rd Champion Boat T & R - Blackfin - Skipper Wayne Steel, Bob Crutchfield, Shannon Danby, Junior Dylan Steel (back)

Skipper Wayne Steel thought he had a good plan, so he and his crew of Dylan Steel, Shannon Danby and Bob Crutchfield were ready to give it everything from the first day of the competition… and as it turned out, they were on fire! By the end of fishing on the first weekend, they had caught four marlin in two days, and were coming a very close second in the tournament.

Skipper Wayne’s son, 15 year old Dylan, had caught one Blue and two Striped Marlin.  This was outstanding and made him a standout on the individual leader board especially the junior point score whilst also threatening to take over the senior point score as well.  Fellow angler Shannon Danby was impressed with his Striped marlin tag which helped their score along very close to the overall lead.

All on board were very pleased with their efforts over the first weekend and apart from losing some vital lures, all they could hope was that the following weekend’s weather and fish would be on par with their challenge. 

And Thursday/Friday weather was great!   And the ‘Blackfin’ crew caught another nice marlin late last week.  There certainly wasn’t much in the point score between the top boats and congratulations to Blackfin as they secured third place overall for Champion Boat Tag and Release.

Mick Giles, Bluewater Legal presents Dylan Steel with Junior Champion T & R trophy

Even better, Dylan Steel got his name up in lights by winning the Champion Junior Angler (Tag and Release) trophy, which was a great effort both individually, and on the part of the ‘Blackfin’ crew who helped make it all happen for Dylan - nice one guys!

It’s great to see a local Coffs Coast boat go to a contest like the Golden Lure and do so well against pretty heavy duty competition.  Congratulations again to Wayne Steel, Dylan Steel, Shannon Danby and Bob Crutchfield.

Team Seaborn

Nicholas “Lambchop” Edwards captured this 25kg mahi-mahi while fishing in the Coffs Harbour Game Fishing Club’s monthly competition on 3^rd January 2010.  

Fishing on local boat ‘Seaborn’ skippered by Clayton Livingston, Nic had a 15 minute battle before this great fish succumbed to his skills, and subject to confirmation, should bag both the NSW and Australian junior 24kg tackle record for mahi-mahi .

What a catch!!

Many of us who have been out thrashing up and down the shelf off Coffs recently have heard radio reports from boats off SW Rocks about how busy they’ve been with black marlin hook-ups for the past couple of weeks. So Paul Clough obviously made a good move when he took his boat ‘Boy N Sea’ down there last week, because he really got among the marlin. Paul and his crew Paula Duncan went out just off Trial Bay gaol and found some good schools of small bonito, then after setting a couple up as live baits to go swimming around the edge of the bait schools, they managed to go 4/4/4 black marlin (4 strikes, 4 hook-ups, 4 tag and release!) for the day. Paula racked up her first marlin on this outing, and then shortly after the first, she bagged her second - nice work!

At one stage, ‘Boy N Sea’ was only 50 metres from another game fishing boat in dead calm conditions, and counted two free swimming marlin just cruising around on the surface between the two boats - and yep, I’ve seen the photos. All round, a fantastic day for Cloughy and his crew… but just to prove that these marlin are on the fickle side, when he went out again two days later, there wasn’t a fish to be found anywhere!

I know plenty of other Coffs game fishermen who’d give a lot for the sight of two free swimming marlin around their boat up here at the moment - me included. However, we seem to be stuck in a slump off Coffs, with very few marlin being raised despite a lot of boats putting in time out on the water. It’s been over two months now since the East Australian Current veered off the shelf and went out to sea, and while there have been some marlin and even yellowfin tuna caught since, I don’t think there are many new arrivals. The current looked liked it was heading in last week, but it’s been hovering too far out since then and still hasn’t brought new water or big fish in close. They all seem to be stepping off the conveyor belt further south, and we’re suffering a marlin drought here.

However, the southeast winds that have been blowing for the past few days often are all it takes to push the EAC back up to the shelf, and there’s every reason to suspect that this might be happening, even though the cloud cover of the past week has made it impossible for the satellites to get a look at the water to confirm this.

The monthly club competition gets underway at 7:00am today, with a decent forecast of winds less than 10 knots all day. Hopefully, conditions will improve enough to lure both the marlin and a big fleet of competitors to the same patch of ocean. See you out there!

                                                                                                                                                Rick O’Ferrall

Still, there’s always a success story out there, and when Glen Booth and Troy Boulton took ‘Wicked Weasel’ out over the shelf last Sunday, they had a blinder of a day with the first big yellowfin tuna haul of the season. The yellowfin have been conspicuous by their absence so far this summer, but the ‘Wicked Weasel’ team hauled in 11 nice fish weighing up to about 20kg, tagging and releasing 8 of them. Got Wasabi anyone…?

Troy seems to have the touch this week, because when he went out with Mark Edgely on ‘The Edge’ the next day, they drove right into a nice marlin hotspot, hooking up two striped marlin in close succession, and getting one to the boat for tagging - great job Mark and “Lucky” Troy! Their marlin action all came around 70 fathoms or so, and it seems that at least this week, the top edge of the shelf is the place to be for marlin, even though the EAC is not really coming in any closer than about 400 fathoms at the moment.

Readers may recall that the crew on Coffs boat ‘Blackfin’ caught a bunch of marlin down at Port Macquarie recently. One of these juvenile black marlin they caught was sporting a couple of growths on it that they described at the time as looking for all the world like “seaweed”. A little research has revealed that it’s not uncommon for these young fish to be carrying the occasional parasitic external worm colony, and that these can look very much like a seaweed growth. In the heat of the moment when you’re trying to tag and release a healthy young fish without keeping it beside the boat too long, it’s probably easy to be sucked in by the worm’s camouflage and mistake it for a weed growth. But what a way to live! Frankly, I can think of easier ways to spend at least part of your lifecycle than stuck to the side of a 30 kilometer per hour torpedo!

The forecast for the next few days has strong easterly winds and a heavier groundswell than we’ve seen for some weeks, and while it might be good for windsurfers, it’s to be hoped it’s short-lived, and that we can get back out and find things are settling down on the shelf. Hopefully, the game fishing will become more consistent as we get into the second half of our season, and for those of us with a lot of space in our freezers, it would also be good to find that this week’s late appearance of yellowfin tuna wasn’t a one-off event.

                                                                                                                                Rick O’Ferrall

Of course, the biggest news came from down at Port Macquarie again, where Wayne Steel and the ‘Blackfin’ crew caught another nice marlin late last week, and with that, they secured third place overall for Tag and Release in the Golden Lure tournament. Even better, Dylan Steel got his name up in lights by winning the Champion Junior Angler (Tag and Release) trophy, which was a great effort both individually, and on the part of the ‘Blackfin’ crew who helped make it all happen for Dylan - nice one guys!

It’s great to see a local Coffs Coast boat go to a contest like the Golden Lure and do so well against pretty heavy duty competition… and it’s to be hoped this trend continues, because we’d all like to see our team of 8 boats going down to the big Interclub Tournament in Port Stephens later in February put on a competitive display and come back with similar results.

One of the other more noteworthy local efforts for the week was from Doug Sinclair and the boys on ‘Secret Men’s Business’ - they raised and tagged a nice sailfish! You don’t encounter too many sailfish down this way, and this one was a fair way from its tropical home, so it was great to see another exotic billfish caught and released off Coffs.

Along the Coffs Coast, we’re still under the intermittent influence of the large eddy of water that sent the East Australian Current streaming away offshore back in early December. When the EAC spun out to sea a couple of months ago, I was pretty sceptical when one of our club members told me that he’d seen this happen before, and that it had sometimes taken “months” for the main current to work its way back in and once again run steadily down the edge of the continental shelf. Sadly, this has turned out to be correct, with the current staying out between 35 and 70 miles offshore for weeks now. Also, it’s as much about water quality as water temperature - at least when it comes to blue marlin. When Glen Booth took ‘Wicked Weasel’ out last week, he described the water as “…blue, but steely, and not the super special marlin blue”… and he was right on, because despite raising a couple of marlin that same day on ‘Foreign Exchange’, we thought the water looked pretty dead all the way down to Southwest Rocks.

However, over the space of three days earlier this week, the EAC has slowly been working its way back to the shelf, and as this column was written, it had settled in only 22 miles off Coffs, with 28C water now running down the 1000 fathom line again. If this continues, the blue marlin specialists may actually have something to chase by the weekend! And for those who like to fish in close, that’s still where the bait and the baby black marlin are, because those little blacks aren’t nearly as fussy about water quality - they’ll go anywhere the bait is.

                                                                                                                                Rick O’Ferrall

Despite the EAC being so far out to sea you’d need a seaplane and a packed lunch to get to it, there have been huge numbers of game fish in the cooler water along the continental shelf, although they’ve only been on the bite intermittently. For example, last Thursday, everything was quiet until about 10:30am, when suddenly, every boat out around the 65 fathom line started to see marlin come up to their lures. All of a sudden, the black marlin were biting like crazy, and for 90 minutes, just about every boat tagged a fish… then it went absolutely dead again! In fact, it was the same most days, where just about every boat that went out did manage to raise marlin, and for the first time in weeks, the striped marlin have re-appeared and are being caught right alongside the blacks.

In the past week, there have been at least 15 marlin hooked up, of which 8 were reported tagged, and it was ‘Rosanna’ skippered by Glenn Bosworth that was the boat to be near - those guys were simply red hot and couldn’t make a wrong move. Glenn and his crew raised 8 marlin during the week, ending up tagging 3. One of his best hook-ups was on 15kg line, with Amy Bosworth on the rod for two hours  before the fish broke off. They also had a double hookup of striped marlin, and Glen said that at one stage, every lure he had out in the water had a marlin tracking along behind it - 5 lures, and 5 marlin in the pattern - all at the same time! If you see this once in a lifetime, you’ll never forget it! At the end of their week, the ‘Rosanna’ crew had sore arms, 6 lures trashed, three lures MIA, and one Tiagra big game reel totally seized and in the repair shop. That’s a hell of a good week of game fishing!

Other boats that ventured out and found a marlin during the week included ‘Seaborn’, ‘Wicked Weasel’, ‘Hoo Kares’, ‘Stella II’, and ‘On Business’. There were also some other big game fish out there, and ‘Matador’ did manage to find several very nice mahi-mahi around 20kg - after all, a freezer full of mahi-mahi steaks isn’t too bad a consolation prize if you missed the marlin.

But the biggest news came from further south at Port Macquarie. Last weekend was the first two days of the four day Golden Lure Game Fishing Tournament, and one of the Coffs club boats, ‘Blackfin’ went down to Port to represent us. Skipper Wayne Steel had a good plan, so he and his crew of Dylan Steel, Shannon Danby and Bob Crutchfield were ready to give it everything from the first day of the competition… and as it turned out, they were on fire! By the end of fishing on Sunday, they had caught four marlin in two days, and are currently coming a very close second in the tournament. Skipper Wayne’s son Dylan has caught one blue and two striped marlin, and is a standout on the individual leader board, being well ahead on the junior pointscore, and threatening to take over the senior pointscore as well. Shannon Danby’s striped marlin got them very close to the overall lead, and we now have to wait until next Saturday to find out if they were able to follow up with another fantastic two days and move into the lead. Go Team Blackfin - the whole club’s behind you!

                                                                Rick O’Ferrall

Nicholas Edwards captured a 25kg mahi-mahi while fishing in the Coffs Harbour Game Fishing Club’s monthly competition on Saturday 2 January 2010. Nic was fishing on local boat ‘Seaborn’ skippered by Clayton Livingston when they captured this great fish.  Using all his skills, Nic managed to land the fish after 15 minutes, and subject to confirmation, should bag both the NSW and Australian junior 24kg tackle record for mahi-mahi .

Rick O’Ferrall

If you require any clarification of pointscore records held, please contact our Score Recorder on 0437 220 375.

Point Score Report - OUT OF PORT

Summary of Angler Tag&Release Points

Points

10000.00

2300.00