4WD 4life

We flew into Melbourne from our home of Tassie and thanks to plane delays didn’t arrive until almost 8pm. We were due to leave the picturesque harbour of Bermagui at 6.30 the next morning, so it was obvious we weren’t going to get much sleep!

 

At just after 4.00am we arrived at the Bermagui Motor Inn after drinking far too many energy drinks and experimenting with over the shelf ‘stay awake’ drugs. Needless to say at 6.00am when our ‘guru’ for the trip was knocking on our doors we weren’t all that well rested. Very sleepily we shuffled onto the boat, a 35 foot game fishing vessel and out we went on a hazy South Coast morning.

 

Reports for marlin fishing had been good. The water off Bermagui was a deep purple in colour and the perfect temperature for big fish. We had turned up at the right time and the wind for the day was light, so we were hopeful of at least seeing one of these magic fish!

 

Our track record for marlin fishing on Hook, Line and Sinker wasn’t great. We’d managed a couple of fish for the camera over the years, but more often than not the camera tends to turn even the hottest of hot marlin bites very, very cold, very, very quickly! But today was different…

 

After a frustrating hour spent trying to catch live bait from the inshore grounds and failing miserably, we ventured out to the continental shelf, only a run of 12 miles. Once there we were greeted with bait schools on the surface and brilliant blue water.

 

We caught enough live bait for the day after only 10 minutes, then started trolling. Our method of catching the marlin was to tease them, using big lures with no hooks in them. Once a fish came up on the teaser/lure, we would pull it away from him, making him angry and even more aggressive. Then pitch the marlin a live bait. There’s two reasons for this method which is called switch baiting, firstly, you get a better hook-up rate, secondly, it’s spectacular. Often you hook the marlin only a few meters from the back of the boat. Real ‘heart in mouth’ stuff!

 

We trolled north along the shelf and eventually arrived at some canyons. Here we found a buoy floating on the water – around this buoy was several hungry dolphin fish. They tend to live in the warm blue waters in summer, hanging around any flotsam they can find. So forgetting about marlin for a minute, we turned our attention to catching a dolphin fish. It was easy enough, and we caught a couple on light rods, but as always is the case, just when we took our minds off marlin, one showed up!

 

Our deckie was quick to pull the teaser away from the very agro marlin and Nick pitched it a live bait on a spinning rod. It was a text book hook-up and all recorded at close quarters by our camera man. Nick was hooked-up to a striped marlin of 80 kilos or so and it wasn’t even 9.00am!

 

After a spectacular fight where the marlin spent more time jumping then it did swimming, we had our fish along the side the boat and released.

 

We went back to trolling our teasers and had another fish come up straight away. It wasn’t too interested and vanished shortly after we spotted it. But a few more laps of the area and another lit up, angry marlin came in on the short teaser. This time Andrew pitched the bait and the hook-up was again perfect!

 

While Nick’s fish only took 15 minutes to land on the light spinning gear, Andrew’s fish was a lot more stubborn and spent most of the time down deep. It took over an hour before the fish was along side and successfully released. What a day! Even though we didn’t really know what day of the week it was thanks to no sleep, we were pumped after what can only be described as one of the best ever filming days in Hook, Line and Sinker history!