- Trolling hard body and casting soft plastic lures
After failing to find a suitable launching spot at Cape Cleveland the previous day (that'll teach me to go by Google Earth alone) I decided to head towards somewhere that I knew would provide relatively quick access to some suitable fishing grounds. Pallarenda provided the fastest route to the middle reef that lies somewhere between Townsville and Magnetic island, so I launched from the boat ramp near the bayside picnic grounds on Cape Pallarenda road. It was an event less troll along the way, with 4.5km of water passing without a single touch. Within only minutes of reaching the reef, however, a nice Trevally of around 45cm fell for a Gold bomber lure.
The tide was rising, although the reef was close enough to the surface to keep powerboats off it and also restricted what kind of lures I could use. Even the shallow diving bomber was getting snagged up so I switched to a popper for a while, although that failed to generate any interest. I followed this effort with a 4" minnow soft plastic, which I cast in various directions and retrieved steadily over the top of the reef. Surprisingly I failed to manage even a single hook up this way so eventually I went back to trolling. This time I decided to skirt the edges of the reef and troll a deeper diving Rapalla lure (that famous red-headed style again) and it wasn't long before it got smashed by something big and pissed off. Fortunately this happened on the Godzilla rod, which took the following beating extremely well.
I was pretty sure that I had hooked a shark as soon as the fight began because rather than go for long spirited runs like a tuna or mackeral, whatever I'd hooked here had more explosive power but not quite the same sort of staying power common with pelagics. It was definitely strong enough to tow me around for a short while, managing to gain quite a bit of line in the first couple of minutes. I was able to turn the tide fairly easily by pedaling towards it steadily as I began to fight back. Before long I caught my first glimpse and was both pleased and disappointed. Pleased that my instincts were right - it was a reef shark of some description, about 140 cm in length - but disappointed because all I wanted here was my lure back... and that was going to be challenging without pissing it off even more.
When the shark spotted me the fight got even more frantic, with hard runs that almost pulled the rod from my hands on one occasion. It swam around underneath me for some time and moved around so much that I was alternating between fishing from port and starboard for another 5 minutes or so. Every time the shark made a visual on me it would run again, and so it went until eventually I could feel some of it's strength waning. Satisfied that it's fight was fought I did the ol' lift and wind and brought it to the side of the kayak. The lure was wedged solidly in it's mouth, which was lined with lots of little sharp teeth. As misfortune would have it, both trebles were snagged, so I had to think about how best to approach this.
Just as I was preparing my towel across the deck of the kayak in readiness to wrap around the shark it got spooked and went for one last desperate run, shearing the leader with it's teeth in the process. That was probably the worst thing it could have done really, because although it regained freedom, it also gained a new lure to go along with it's smile. I was going to return it as safely as I could, but not without removing that lure first. Unfortunately I didn't get the chance, which means the shark will probably die, not to mention the lure is lost as well.
That sort of thing doesn't happen very often, but it's frustrating when it does. Had I known for sure that the shark was edible, tasty and legal, I would have just gaffed it (far too big for the net), hauled it aboard and put it out of it's misery. In this instance I just took time in order to be as delicate as I could and it just happened to backfire. It probably wouldn't have happened if I was using a wire trace (I was using 50lb fluro carbon). Indeed, I may not have even hooked it at all had I been using a wire trace, which highlights the dilemma of doing so.
In my experience, it's not all that common to catch sharks and rays on lures. That's actually one of the reasons I prefer using them - I don't typically target sharks, which I think are more likely to fall for a flesh bait of some kind. So a part of me was a little surprised when I reeled it in. The other part of me just reminded myself of where I was and with that in consideration, then I wasn't surprised at all. Oh... and there's also the fact that those illustrious red-headed hard body lures seem to be able to catch just about anything.
I didn't get a photo of the shark simply because I was planning to remove the lure from it's mouth first.
