Had to come down to Perth for work so decided to spend a few days catching up with the family and thought I had better see if could get out on a Samson Jigging Charter whilst I was here...... Had to test out the new jigging set up.
Organised a trip with Saltwater Charters and was pretty excited, as Craig the skipper said they had been ripping into the Sambos. After a sleepless night I was off to Hillarys Marina to jump on board and get ready to head out. Bacon & egg sangas and coffee
onboard then off we headed out to the grounds, only 11 of us onboard with about 5 regular fishos and a few who hadn't fished much.Heres a photo of some of the bling, there was Saltigas and Stellas and allsorts of flash jigging rods
Man was I keen to test out the little PE 1-3 Venom & Trinidad 16N...
We arrived at our first drift which was in 30 metres which is shallow for Sambos with a lot of jigging done in 100m, and the big display screen of the sounder lit up(It's here I should insert the photo of sounder, but I was too excited fishing and forgot to take one)
The Skipper shut the motors off and we all dropped our knife jigs and big soft plastics down,
Anticipation was rife....
Hit the bottom.....
Jig like mad,
Bang, one hook up, bang two hookups, bang three hookups, bang four hookups & so on, there were rods bent right over everywhere, reels screaming and fishos grunting getting spanked by Sambos...
And these were just the smaller fish.
Man they pull hard.
Spent about an hour jigging up these fish I managed to land 3, before we headed out to another spot in 40 metres of water where the bigger models were hanging out.
Sounder lights up, motor cuts, everybody drops..
These fish were a bit fussier to tempt preferring pillies dropped down, I wasn't going to make the switch and kept working the 150gm jig like a madman
(I should add a work colleague of my wifes and friend of ours Pete Z suggested that I might be a bit undergunned and lent me his Saltiga GT6000 and 30kg rod.loaded with 80lb braid...which I carted down to Perth and left in the car at the jetty
) After getting smoked for the 3rd time I was thinking he might have been right....
I ended up with burn marks from the braid on the top grip of my jigging rod she was bent that far over!!! Think I need a PE 3-5 as well.......
One of the lads on board got smoked 7 times
It was great fun though trying to pull them up before they hit structure and pinged you
Whilst I never managed a bigger fish myself there was couple in the 35kg range boated and they are awesome looking fish!!!
One of the lads managed a 50kg sambo the week before
Was great to see Craig the skipper do everything possible to ensure any fish that had trouble releasing were dropped back down with a release weight
I would highly reccomend that if you get the chance to have a crack at these critters DO IT!!!!
Cheers Muntzy.
