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Trip Reports Hervey Bay Pulgul creek, Hervey Bay | Pulgul creek, Hervey Bay | | Print | |
| Written by Josh | |||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 12 September 2007 | |||||||||||||
Spooled in sixty seconds
 Flathead, caught with Power Monnow soft plastic For a moment there he gave a pretty good account of himself on the lightweight 4kg braid line he was attached to, but after a couple of brief runs he was so tuckered out that I think the Environet came as a bit of a relief to him. I found this plump Flathead in amongst the mangroves under a canopy of trees, hooking him only moments after taking this photo. You can tell by looking at it that only very small boats would have any hope of fishing this area. I later discovered that Estuary cod do the rounds here as well, although I didn't stick around long enough to find out. I did hook 2 more Flathead, both of which were undersize and thus released unharmed.  Mangroves of Pulgul creek - just try and get a powerboat in here :-) With dinner in the bag I moved back out into the bay to try my luck for either a Pelagic in the open water, or otherwise perhaps a Bream along the rocks at the Marina breakwall. I failed on the former, only managing a large Porcupine fish which was also released. I did, however, hook onto something with a whole lot of zeal only meters out from the breakwall and it tore off like a rocket. If it was a Bream, it was by far the biggest I'd ever hooked. If asked to guess what it was I'd put my money on a Queenfish though. I wasn't able to find out for sure because it moved so quickly that my light flickstick was just no match for it and I could only watch in despair as it spooled my line.  52cm Flathead I was in the process of trying to prevent that from happening, swinging the kayak around in order to pedal towards it. Sadly I was just too slow for this little missile, which emptied the spool of line in under a minute. In hind sight I should have tightened the drag more than I did, but with the line I was using I figured that may well result in a bust off - something that's been happening a bit too often of late (for precisely that reason). In many ways the fish did me a favor though, because I've recently decided to start using mono again instead of braid, so this little encounter just sped up the process for this particular reel. Another highlight for the day was spotting a small pod of Indo-pacific humpback dolphins, which disappeared from view as soon as they noticed me. That was a shame because I was just getting my camera ready when they decided to make themselves scarce.
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