Mini Tarpon (Herring)

Just a quick report from the last two LRF sessions and as you can see we've getting a few herring recently, I'm not sure if they'll turn out to be an annual visitors to the harbour or not but they certainly are great fun to catch on the LRF gear and I hope that they'll be around for a little while longer. I must admit though that before I started fishing LRF, I would have been blissfully unaware of the presence and indeed I didn't see a single other person out fishing for them on either weekend. Anyway, I started catching them last weekend while Sam was away on his holidays and had a bunch of them on Berkley floating trout worms rigged on a 1.5g jig-head, Maria paddle-tailed sp's (Ma worm action-fish) and small blade lures (Spinmad Cma 2.5g).

Needless to say Sam was pretty eager to back get out and see if the herring were still about when he returned, so with a very iffy forecast for increasingly high winds last night, we headed down to the local harbour to see if we could tuck away somewhere and try to find some more herring. We were intending to fish one of the more sheltered inner harbours from a little after low water up to high, well that was the plan anyway however the wind made things a bit tricky, restricting the spots that we could fish effectively and eventually the high gusts sent us packing but not before we caught a few fish. I think we must have landed about ten herring or so in the end and lost/dropped as many but we also caught a few other species too, whiting, pouting and I think Sam caught a little Scorpion too. Most fish were caught on floating trout worms, gulp sandworm and straw-tails last night and with slightly heavier weights than last week. Still a fun session in spite of the conditions and hopefully we'll have another crack at them next week.

My Set-up:

Rod:  Major Craft Solpara7' 3" (0.5-5g) Solid Tip

Reel: Shimano Rarenium 2500
Line: Daiwa Tournament 8strand 10lb braid

Leader: 6lb FC

Lures: Berkley floating trout worms, Maria Mama worm Actionfish, SpinMad Blades 

Sam's Set-up:
Rod: Reins Raz 7' 6"-0.4-7g
Reel: Shimano Stradic CI4 2500 
Line: 2lb FC 
Lures: Berkley floating trout worms, Maria Mama worm Actionfish, Marukyu Power Isome