This trip we are heading to Royal Charlotte Reef again. 12 hours of travel time to get to the reef.
Once we reached the spot, we started jigging. I was the 2nd to hookup and it was a small Dogtooth Tuna. Gave a pretty decent fight on light tackle.
We were doing a mix of jigging and bottom fishing. I set up my bottom rig with circle hooks with frozen sardines as bait. Up came a small Flame Snapper. Haven't caught this fish before. Nice coloring and tail.
Re-loaded with bait and dropped down again. At this time, the boat had moved to a deeper spot, around 150m. With the current going, I'm guessing my line went out around 200m! Adding a 500g sinker, the crank back up is going to be a bitch!
Since its so deep, I disregarded all the small nibbles of fish and held on to the rod in free spool. Then suddenly, a fish took the bait and ran! I let the fish take line for about 5secs and then closed the drag lever. Rod loaded up and FISH ON! Fish gave a good fight from deep and I had to switch to low gear drag on my Talica 12II and slowly reeled it up. Fish showed red coloring and was a nice Ruby Snapper! These fish are always so beautiful!
Re-baited and dropped the rig over. As the rig was going down, I suddenly felt a snap and the line became slack...... Darn it! Reeled it back and my main line was cut!
Then another angler hooked up on a big fish. Managed to reeled it up and it was a monster Barracouta!
Then I knew that my line was probably cut by these pesky fish.
After dinner, we moved spot again and began jigging. I managed to hook up a Big-Eye Trevally on lumo jig. These fish are feisty buggers! Wished it was bigger though!
After a while, the razor gang moved in. Other anglers were getting their line cut mid-water by the nuisance Barracoutas. They were not only losing jigs left, right and center but fish too!
At this point, I didn't feel like losing more jigs to the fish and as I was still feeling a bit queasy from the 12hr journey, slept through till the next afternoon.
Afternoon bottom bashing yielded quite a variety of fishes. I managed to hook up this fatty Rusty Jobfish.
Nice sunset on the reef!
Night-time jigging scored this Rainbow Runner!
Next day, moved around the reef to within casting distance.
Caught all sorts of reef fish.
Last day on the reef. Woke up at 5am, hoping to score some fish at sunrise. Tossed out my Halco Twisty 40g on my spinning gear, 2 rips and was hooked up! Fish ON! A quick fight later, the fish was on board. A metre-long Barracuda. What a nice wake-up call!!
Soon everyone was awake and fishing. One angler caught a horse of a Barracuda, putting my fish to shame!
As we were still plagued by the Barracoutas, we moved closer to the reef to fish. I managed to hook up quite a few colorful fish from the reefs.
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A variety of fish caught on the whole trip.
Overall, we were quite disappointed with the trip as the Barracouta were wreaking havoc to our fishing. Lost countless jigs, main braided lines and sinkers. The fish that we caught were not as many as we had last year.
Well, that's fishing! There's always next year!
