The Snapper in the Bay Of Islands still continue to fire with 2 great trips today. Danielle and partner Joe were lucky enough to be on both trips and though Danielle gave the more experienced Joe a “whipping” in terms of fished hook, Joe still appeared to have a great time and still caught plenty of nice snapper on Soft bait. The best fish of the day was around 25 pounds – released of course – and caught by Danielle.

The orders for this trip were a little different. Pick up some Australians from staying on a hired 44 foot sailing cat from one of the Islands in the Morning and teach them how to fish for snapper and kingfish in the Bay. Step one was to catch live bait which was easy at about 500 meters from their sailing cat. The kinfish wern’t around any of my normal popper fishing spots so we headed out to Cape Brett were conditions were a little sloppy but it wasn’t long before we had a a couple of nice Kinfish on board and quickly left the sloppy conditions for calmer water inside the bay for a quick and successful snapper soft baiting lesson before heading back to the catermaran to clean the snapper for dinner.

The fishing wasn’t fast but was steady with everyone landing at least one nice fish and several kingfish getting off. The biggest one was lost early on but we did manage to get into a steady stream of good bites later on with several fish released and just one kept to feed everyone. The current was incredible – requiring 32 ounces plus of lead to get the live mackeral down where normally 10 ounces is plenty!

And the run of Snapper continues. With more big Snapper on Soft-baits most trips!

Another successful snapper fishing trip out of Paihia in the Bay Of Islands. This was the 12:30 lunchtime trip which has pretty pretty consistently good lately.

The snapper fishing is still going strong with the lunchtime charters working the best at the moment though as the tide changes the evenings should get better in the next few days.

The Eggers group again slayed some nice Snapper today – with all the bigger ones and plenty of nice sized ones released to breed and make for good fishing in the future. Just a feed of half a dozen nice sized pannies was kept to eat. I here through the grapevine that the group split into two groups, the boys with us and the girls on another good Bay Of Islands boat and had a fishing competition. Evidently the boys one – does this mean that the girls had to cook the boys fish?

While the Marlin fishing didn’t go according to plan due to the slightly unconfortable conditions, plan B turned out to more than make up for it!

The Eggers group slayed some excellent Snapper and small kingfish using soft bait on light tackle.

The marlin have been firing in the Bay though with a new World record Blue Marlin landed on Hookin Bull, another New Zealand record Blue Marlin to Hookin Bull (point something away from the World Record) and a 209 kg striped marlin landed on Salt Shaker a couple of days ago – amongst numerous other marlin, short billed spear fish and mahi-mahi landed and lost. We are itching to get out after them but ecomomics requires us to concentrate on earning money this time of year which means mainly snapper and kinfish trips – and marlin when we get someone prepared to private charter the whole boat for NZ$1200 for the day.

No Marlin for us, but a nice Mahimahi by New Zealands standards! Conditions were a little choppy but the crew keen on one of New Zealands monstor striped marlin were at least rewarded with this nice Mahimahi.

1 nice 15 kilo Kingfish landed and a couple of bust-offs as well as plenty of barracouda kept the interest level up for this mornings Kinfish trip. Not as fast and furious as we like but still at least one nice yellowtail kinfish was landed and everyone caught something.

A few nice snapper and an even better Kingfish made for a great trip this evening.