Mahia Peninsula Mixed Species Carnage

[Epicskwid]

The first thing that comes to my mind when talking about Mahia would be ‘paradise’ or ‘happy place’.

While travelling down the country from Whitianga to Napier.. the weather gods decided today was the day. Barely a breath of wind in the forecast. Bugger all swell.
Get. Me. On. The. Water.

The morning rolled around after our 8 hour drive and I was buzzing as usual. You really can catch anything in this part of the country. Onto the water at 6am and I shot off to find my reef marks.
Target species for the reef :
Tarakihi
Blue Cod
Snapper
Well as soon as I hit my mark the sounder lit up with sign. Not over the top of the reef but on the sand just off the rock. This always seems to be where the fish hang out.
Down went some squid and some tuna and bang! on immediately. A snapper ,

bang other rod blue cod. Constant bites. I already knew with them going off like this it would be a special one. It was pretty hectic with every drop getting smoked by either a blue cod / snapper or kahawai.
I had a Tarakihi Terminator flasher down waiting for the turkeys that I know live around this spot. My other rod went off and I pulled a Gurnard in. By this point I had lost count of the snapper that I had caught and released. The terminator went off and I had a nice scrap out of an unknown fish. No way! another PB Tarakihi for the yak. 1.4kg and 43cm .

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unreal.
Time to get out deeper to try and get some larger fish. Anchored on sand in 23m and chucked the burley down.
Now normally what happens in this situation is a wait of up to 1 hour. Not on this day. Not 10 minutes later the fish were already here. Gurnard pounced onto both my rods again and again, forcing me to go down to one rod.

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in a matter of 30 minutes I had 4 in the bin and had released just as many. The next few hours were fast and furious. Snapper , Gurnard , Kahawai and Trevally continued to destroy my baits.. I put the best of these onto ice and released the rest. A school of kingfish swam past, then I had a large barracouta come up and eat a mackerel off my line which then got hooked. What an unreal morning. To top it off the weather couldn’t have been any better.

What a trip.

[Bear Jules]

Epic TR Epic! As always a really great report. Thanks for sharing. It's made me fizzing to get out on the water!!! Ps very nice Terakihi mate

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[Waylander]

Nice mixed bag!
The cuda seem to be out in force atm, I've switched to just using softies and don't seem to get anywhere near as many as when bait fishing.

[Marc N]

ffffff... Brilliant!

Here I am faffing about with batteries, I'm going to ditch the wife and get out on the next < 8 knot day.

[Blazer60]

That's awesome, well done.