Day 23 – Bye Bye

After a weekend of paddling, the body was against a big paddle, but hey, it’s only 2 km and a bit to Goat Island from Whangaumu Bay, what’s another 2 km… I’m sure it’ll be worth it, well I hope so at least!

My family had come up from Auckland to see me in Ngunguru this weekend, it was great to see them, we all seemed to spend a bit of time in the kayak at some point, we went exploring on the spit which you can only access by swimming across, by boat, or in our case by kayak, I ferried my wife and kids over in the kayak, then Josh and I went fishing Saturday night and then me and Jess, my daughter, went for a fish/paddle this morning, all good but my body hated me, hehe.

This evening the weather was next to perfect, so I decided to head over to Goat Island, a few people had told me to check it out, well they can’t all be wrong can they…

It’s about a 25 minute paddle across the bay, got there and the landscape is completely different from the north side of the bay, it felt much more fishy!

So time to throw a bait around, first trying a softbait cast against the rocks in the wash, nothing, well a couple of small bites but that was it.  Cast ahead of myself, bait sinks, bang, a hit, string pulled, then dropped, damn! Reel it back in to check the bait was still there, and bang again, this time I was hooked up. Woah this thing is running at a million miles an hour, drag is tweaked up but I still can’t stop it, then it goes deep, a Kingfish may be, but than it develops the Snapper nod nod nod, this must be a decent Snapper, after about three minutes I manage to get it within sight, ah looks like a small Kingi, ah no it’s not, wow another new species for the thirty days, a big fat Kahawai!

If it had been earlier in the day then this guy would have gone out as a live bait for a Kingfish, but as it was already 8:00pm  he got to go free. I had a few more casts around and nothing else turned up, so I paddled around to the east side of Goat Island and fished between the island and the reef, couple of casts, few small hits but nothing major.  Then a hookup and a good one at that, another Kahawai, hmm maybe. After a couple of minutes I was proved wrong and a nice Snapper broke the surface!

After a quick photograph, I put the camera down, unhooked the fish, went to get my knife so I could dispatch the Snapper as this one was going home for a feed, for some reason the Snapper didn’t like this idea and did a triple back flip somersault back into the water..! Bye bye fish…

Ah well, plenty more where that one came from, or so I thought… I landed four more Snapper after that one but would you believe it not a single one of them was even legal never mind being as large as the “big one”…

By now it’s pretty dark so I pull the pin and paddle back to Whangaumu, by the time I get there it’s very dark, ah well I’ve been somewhere new, caught another species, and something tells me I’ll be back at Goat Island sometime soon…