What Summer?

It’s nice to finally be seeing a few more settled days but the persistent winds are still about. We have had to modify and adapt our apporach on these days and at times a no frills approach is best, there’s no point fighting what you can’t control. One trip recently being a case of hanging on for the ride and being rewarded with glass calm water and obliging sighted Kingfish. 

This capped off a week of witnessing clients firsts, all of which taking their first Kingfish on fly. The satisfaction they get is pretty infectious and seeing it all come to fruition is reward in itself. 

For a few weeks the markers seemed to be void of fish at times. Early morning change of tide it’s definitely worth a sniff around a few and we’ve raised a number now to make it part of the focus for the day. Seeing a mob of kings mooching around a pole looking for trouble certainly gets the blood going. It pays to shop around though as some are redundant one day and hot the next. 

Work ups are more prominent in the channels and often tightly packed bait are getting smashed to pieces by the angries. If you get sick of catching Kahawai try flicking a small baitfish fly over the side as you bring it to the boat. The regurgitation of bait can see Kingfish inhale a dead drifted fly during the commotion. Easy fishing and some bigger specimens lurk among the rats. 

The flats are humming with life, small flounder and piper are the mainstays at the moment although I’m a sucker for topwater action. Vary the retrieves and get that fly swimming nicely, sometimes less is more… Having a kingfishs nose prodding a popper is nothing to sneeze at and a visual that won’t go away in a hurry. 

The Salt fly hook up is just around the corner and registrations open now. Matto from SaltFlyFish and myself are going to be running on the water workshops so if you’d like to be part of one please make contact with us. I have a busy week ahead and am looking forward to showing a few more people around. Today it’s blowing 40 bastards and I’ve cancelled a trip, let’s hope it comes right soon as there’s some spectacular fishing to be had right now.