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Rumour fro m the coffee bar or the Marlin Bar, something overheard on Channel 81, maybe personal experience if we went out for a day in Foreign Exchange, or accounts of what someone else passed on, plus the occasional photo - or a mix of all of the above. All that plus a few thoughts on what's happening here on the Solitary Coast for the past year or so and what it might mean to game fishermen will appear on these pages. Regardless, if we hear of anything interesting from the game fleet, it will end up here. I had an interesting conversation today with George Blackwell. Regular readers of this column may recall that George was until a couple of years ago, a keen local game fisherman in Coffs Harbour, frequently seen crewing on Hemingway and Foreign Exchange. Recently, George was able to cash in on both his skills as a chef and as a game fishing crewman and spent the last season on Kestelle as a pro, fishing the Cairns Heavy Tackle Black Marlin season, and just about everything on between along the Queensland coast.

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Needless to say, after a season fishing hard for big blacks off the Reef in FNQ, George has a lot of great stories to tell, as well as a wealth of experience up there mixing it with the big boys, and I can see a series of interviews at the Marlin Bar coming up while George hangs out down here before Kestelle's 2018 season campaign begins. Watch out for 'The Blackwell Tapes'. One thing that George did elaborate on was the potential for an expanded game fishing scene off Fraser Island in the spring. Extremely good structure and the proximity of the continental shelf edge to the northern tip of Fraser Island looks like it harbours a much bigger marlin fishery than many people realised, and that the potential for black marlin, blue marlin, and even striped marlin as well as great light tackle sportfishing for pelagics has hardly been touched by the sound of it. George mentioned that despite the ample current shown in the SST screenshot below, the current actual faded away last week to much less than is depicted below, and when it dropped off, the marlin bite pretty much came to an end as well. So much for the accuracy of the satellite shots that all this is based on.

More likely the satellite info is pretty good, but the algorithms used to analyse what the satellite is actually looking at still leave much to be desired. Friday, 8th December. Groundhog Day.? The FishTrack SST and Current chart screenshot shown on the left is a sight we've all seen in this part of the world a little too often in recent years to be anything but very disappointing. We know there are big numbers of blue and juvenile black marlin bottled up between the Gold Coast and Fraser Island, but with the East Australian Current being almost completely diverted out into the middle of the Tasman, we're not going to see much if any of that action down on the northern NSW coast anytime soon. This happened around this time last year, and the end result was the worst game fishing season in memory here, so we can only hope that the current breaks away and flows down the edge of the continental shelf soon and we don't suffer any long term effects this summer. Once we see normal current flow, the marlin will follow, but the timing on the duration and strength of the eddies responsible for diverting the current can be anything from one week to one month, so.

On Wednesday, showing an unusually impressive triumph of optimism over experience, both Better than Vegas and Hemingway went out to try to prove that what the satellites are showing us really isn't so. But despite glamour conditions, good looking water, plenty of bait including patches of striped tuna, and a large dose of optimism, skippers Pete English and Marcus Blackwell couldn't raise a thing. This is really bad news for Coffs Coast game fishermen, but unless the occasional hopeful crew goes out for a look like Pete and Marcus did, we'll never know what's really happening out there, so more power to them for giving it a run. We can only assume it's just another speed bump and it'll turn around. ​Of course, some blokes can't stand just waiting for things to get better without at least doing everything in their power to make something happen, and if they've got a trailer boat, they'll do what Ballina stalwart Andrew McClellan did. He packed his boat up, drove his rig up to Fraser Island midweek, and snagged the nice healthy 150kg blue marlin show in the photo below.

Since then, he's tangled with some juvenile black marlin, and another blue marlin, all in just a couple of days, and the latter fish have all been hooked up within a stone's throw of the coastline. Fraser Island is without doubt the hot spot this spring. Way to go Andrew!!! There's a rather ominous ocean current and mesoscale eddy interaction setting up off Byron Bay at the moment, and there's not much good coming from it. This time it's a large clockwise turning eddy that's driving most of the flow of the East Australian Current well out into the Tasman Sea, completely bypassing the northern NSW coast in the process. Regrettably, we've seen this before last summer, when a similar disruption of the current combined with particularly poor weather systems bringing alternating strong northerly and southerly winds to our coast more or less trashed the fishing for weeks at a time. Hopefully, this current disruption will be short-lived and within a week or so, the eddy will weaken and the EAC will go back to flowing down the edge of the continental shelf.

But until it does, the fishing here is likely to be sub-par, and the blue marlin that have been firing up off Fraser Island, as well as the juvenile black marlin coming down from the sub-tropics could have their travel plans delayed. And still on the doom and gloom theme. As if the lack of good EAC flow here wasn't enough, the weather this week is forecast to deliver very limited fishing opportunities out on the edge of the continental shelf, particularly this coming Saturday when local Coffs Harbour clubs are planning to have their monthly competition outings. Things may change, but they'd better do so fast. PARTY TIME.! Notwithstanding whether the club competition day actually happens or not on Saturday, there's still an excellent chance for game fishermen from the Coffs Coast to get together at the Solitary Islands Game Fishing Club's end of year Christmas party on Saturday evening. The venue for the party will be at Attitude at the Jetty, where well-known restauranteur and local game fisherman Marcus Blackwell has organised an excellent menu for the partygoers that for just $30 per person which includes a free beverage on top of plates of crispy pork belly, salt and pepper calamari, sliders, crunchy chips and assorted other mouth-watering dishes that can't help but make for a great evening where we can at least talk about game fishing even if we haven't been doing much of it lately. See you there.!

There was an encouraging message between the lines in this morning's Black Marlin Blog headline by Kelly Dalling-Fallon. She noted that with the one degree centigrade increase in the ocean temperature off Fraser Island yesterday, the hot bite that's been a feature of fishing there for the past month started to evaporate. With slightly cooler water visible on the Satellite SST detail to the south of Fraser, it was no surprise to also read that another boat fishing 40 nautical miles south of Fraser had done well. Does this mean that the blue marlin that have been lighting up the ocean off Fraser are on the move south.??? Hopefully, the answer is yes, and that now they've been driven away from Fraser by the influx of uncomfortably warm Coral Sea water moving in there, we'll see an uptick in the bite off the Gold Coast in the next few days, followed by the arrival of blues in meaningful numbers south of the border in a week or two off the Coffs Coast. Of course, that's only one of the factors that will draw marlin to the south, the other important one being the presence of something to feed on.

The beautiful but empty ocean off Coffs is going to have to fill up a bit with all the usual activity and food before the blues get serious about visiting here. After seeing striped tuna, sauries and flying fish in decent numbers only very briefly in November before it turned into a desert again out there, the return of good bait will be the key. Now, game fishermen will be paying very close attention to the reappearance of good bait before expecting the bite to hot up. ​And if it all coincides with the simultaneous arrival of the juvenile black marlin run, maybe December will produce a grand slam or two to kick off Christmas festivities and some sustained action in the new year. Wednesday, 29th November.

.And the beat goes on. At least it does up off Fraser Island, where game boats are having a blinder, with day after day of big marlin catches. But there's not much happening just to the south on the Gold Coast, and absolutely nothing happening south of the border down to the Coffs Coast and beyond. No serious action (other than some great bottom fishing) reported by the Ballina crew, and even when Black N Blue skipper Rob Lang couldn't sit on his hands any longer watching the perfect fishing weather roll past day after day and went out for a look on Tuesday, drove all around through just more of the same that we've all been seeing for days now. They found the same sterile ocean that's been producing nothing by way of game fishing action for any of the boats trying to break the cycle and get into a hot bite here off Coffs for far too long now. Empty but gorgeous water up to 26C, no baitfish, no flying fish, no birds working anything on the surface, no pilot whales, nada, nil, zip, zero. Kingpin Life Of Crime Cd Crack Repair.

There was a moment of brief excitement when a small striped marlin came up for a look in 80 fathoms on the way back to Coffs, but that sure didn't make up for weather and water which just a few years ago would have had the reels running hot at this time of year. So it's groundhog day on the continental shelf here. We're all just getting up each morning, looking at the near-perfect weather, checking the satellite shots that show nothing's changed with the current still skilfully avoiding bringing us some of that sub-tropical Coral Sea water and the blue marlin that are in it, and then going to bed hoping that tomorrow will show us sign of a hot bite. And if it doesn't change soon, what's going to happen to the annual juvenile black marlin migration down the NSW coast.? Monday, 27th November. Gorgeous weather is still happening on the Coffs Coast, but sadly, nobody's bothering to chase game fish until the disappointingly empty water out beyond the Solitary Islands is swept away by the East Australian Current and replaced by a tropical flow that's got some life in it.

Let's hope that's soon while this incredible fishing weather is still in the frame. Meanwhile, here's a short video of the lads on Foreign Exchange doing their thing with last Friday's blue marlin. The fish was taken on John Stafford's favourite 'Excaliber' 24kg outfit, running a Jennings Gamefish Vuaki Flyer flying fish lure on the shotgun. ​I know there's a brief burst of salty language in the middle, but game fishermen will understand that it seemed completely appropriate under the circumstances. The northern NSW coast is in the middle of one of the most perfect weeks of game fishing weather for years, with 6 days straight now having forecasts with less than 10 knots of winds all day. It didn't always work out that way, with 15 knots featuring on more than one occasion, but it was close, with Friday actually being the most incredible day out there for years. It's been generally fishable for days in a row now, and anglers haven't seen anything like that for years.

However, as so often is the case in this part of the world, all the elements that contribute to memorable days chasing marlin always seem to have trouble coming together at the same time. In this case, the most important element of all was missing - there were almost no marlin.

Perfect weather, perfect water, plenty of boats fishing, but the water was near totally empty. There was no bait in the beautiful 25 degree cobalt blue current water (see the completely empty sounder screen shot below.), and almost no pelagic fish, including marlin. For three days, there were 5, then 1, then 14 boats out fishing, which amounts to about 180 hours of boat time on the water, and somewhere in the vicinity of 900 lure hours. With only 5 marlin raised and one tagged. Whichever way you try to put lipstick on that pig, it was terrible fishing.

Probably typical of most boats fishing over those three days, we saw a handful of flying fish (instead of dozens), and no large baitballs. There were no birds actually working surface pelagic activity at any time over those three days, and we caught one small mahimahi, then finally we saw one lone marlin, which as the exception, we caught and successfully tagged and released after being measured at 270cm (short), which put it at a handy 180kg.

But while being lucky enough to drive over one of the very few marlin on the entire stretch of coast was a great reward for the persistence of Foreign Exchange's exceptional crew over those three days, it didn't put much gloss on what should have been a red hot bite. The water that was flowing down the coast at a less-then-ideal 3 knots was being swept in largely from the middle of the Tasman Sea rather than the sub-tropics, and while that should have been responsible for - at the very least - a good striped marlin bite, the fact that it held almost no baitfish at all meant that all the perfect water in the world wasn't going to produce marlin when there was nothing for them to eat in it. Where is all the bait? Puzzling times.

And very, very disappointing for the Coffs Coast game fishing community. For those of you who didn't spend $200+ on a special drag tension gauge for setting the drag on your rigs, and who use something a little less accurate like basic Shimano analog scales as I do, you no doubt wonder about accuracy and regular calibration. I calibrate my drag scales using a known weight and some digital bathroom scales, but I find that because my drag scales are essentially just a basic uncompensated spring, the readings vary as a function of how warm or cold the scales are, so have to be constantly recalibrated. With that in mind, I found this set of digital luggage scales at Aldi yesterday - for $10! I've since tested them on various known weights I have at home, and they are extremely accurate - certainly more that is required for setting drag on game reels. I didn't find any error over 0.03 kg.

Hell of a deal compared to what an expensive set of drag scales from your fishing supplies mail order outlet would cost. Tuesday 21st November.

With a near-perfect moon phase, a midday high tide, and excellent water on the edge of the shelf, the fishing should be pretty hot out there off the Solitaries at the moment. And once again, the weather forecast for the rest of the week is damned good, with Thursday to Saturday currently in the frame with light morning offshore breezes and a northeast sea breeze of less than 15 knots in the afternoons. If this comes to pass as predicted, this will provide Coffs Coast game fishermen with more potentially good game fishing days in just two weeks than we had all last summer!

There strength of the EAC is a bit of a concern, but on balance, who cares when everything else is looking so promising.?! Besides, when it runs strong, there are usually small areas of current-induced upwellings and eddies along the edge of the shelf around the Canyons that can have a very hot bite (such as up at The Hole - if you can struggle up there in that current) provided you can just find them while they're happening. And now to a bit of fun to summarise last week's fishing. This is the second week in a row where the forecast has at least three days of excellent fishing weather in the frame as the week starts out!

It's great news for anglers on the Coffs Coast who have been hoping for better conditions following the lousy start to the season, and to see 6+ days of good weather over the space of 2 weeks is better than anything we've experienced for the last couple of years. Unless things change for the worse, there will be a string of calm mornings followed by moderate sea breezes in the afternoon - classic marlin fishing weather. There is a slight hiccup (of course. It's never going to be that perfect) out there at the moment in the form of the largest downwelling mesoscale oceanic eddy I've ever seen positioned 150nm southeast of Coffs Harbour - shown in the screen shot from FishTrack above. Fortunately, this eddy has formed well south of where they usually spin up at this time of year (off Cape Byron), so it's not disturbing the path of the East Australian Current anywhere north of SWR.

When these big summer downwelling eddies form north of the the Coffs Coast, they tend to drag the EAC offshore and all the marlin in it simply bypass Coffs and the fishing here goes to hell. However, while this eddy is extremely large at about 280nm across, it's positioned to our southeast, and is therefore not dragging the current away, but is in fact pinning it hard against the shelf instead. ​The downside is that it's pushing so much extra Tasman Sea water onto the coast that its turbocharging the current which looks to be flowing in excess of 4 knots. This may produce some excellent striped marlin fishing on top of the shelf, but as we've seen before, when it flows that fast - and despite it being full of great looking 25C weather - the blue marlin often just keep riding the bus and don't stop off to visit us here. Of course there's only one way to find out what's really happening out there, and with a forecast that is presently promising great fishing conditions from Wednesday onwards, it's to be hoped that plenty of boats take the chance to find out. ​And for anyone wanting to see what a good marlin strike on the Jennings Gamefish lure on our short rigger last week looked like. Two days of glamour game fishing weather off the Solitary Islands have finally seen a good start to the weather blighted game fishing season off Coffs Harbour.

The weather was near-perfect, the water was cobalt blue and 25C in the East Australian Current, and while slow, the fishing was very predictable, with a good marlin bite two hours after the tide turned on both days, and even more predictable by all being around 100 fathoms on the edge of the continental shelf. Foreign Exchange lost a large blue marlin after a one-in-a- million gear failure, but went on the tag a consolation shortbill spearfish on the first day. After being joined by Hemingway and Matador on Wednesday, it was much like groundhog day, with perfect water, although no bait or bird activity to speak of in the morning, and a sudden blue and striped marlin bite at the Coffs Canyons starting exactly 2 hours after the bottom of the tide. John Stafford on Foreign Exchange got the ball rolling mid-afternoon when a 110kg striped marlin decided it had to eat the Jennings Vuaki flying fish imitation on the shotgun, and it was tagged 35 minutes later after putting on a great show. Video of that in a few days. This was the longest striped marlin I've ever seen, and I originally called it at 120kg on the radio, but on reflection wrote it up on the tag card as 110. A good fish regardless, although I was mildly puzzled the next day when I was told that calling any striped marlin over 100kg in Coffs Harbour will have people questioning your credibility.

Before that, Hemingway had a visit from a large (Marcus estimated 200+) blue marlin that looked to be well hooked, ran around all over the ocean, and then spat the hook. However, the Hemingway team made up for it shortly when Beau kept up the pace by tagging a 70kg striped marlin. Down to the south, and also in 100 fathoms, skipper Sultan Linjawi thought he'd made a bad choice by not hanging around the Coffs Canyons and instead taking Matador all the way down to the Nambucca Canyons. But in the end it was a good idea, because they hooked the first fish they saw, a handy blue marlin of 120kg that was tagged and sent on its way to complete a day when every game boat out there tagged a marlin - not bad after all. The coming week is starting to shape up as one of the best so far in this relatively young season, with light easterly breezes all afternoon for several days in succession, and the best chance yet this spring of two or three days of consecutive fishing.

Of course, it may not matter much if the bait and therefore the big fish aren't out there, but with good tides, excellent moon phase, low swell, good current flow bringing 24C+ water to the edge of our continental shelf off the Solitary Islands all in the frame next week, the odds would surely have to be in favour of a good bite developing. There will certainly be several boats taking advantage of this, and the midweek looks best despite that usually limiting the number of boats. I got into a discussion recently about blue marlin techniques, and specifically, a very well-written article in Marlin Magazine by Bonze Fleet about blue marlin fishing. Most of what's written in this article makes sense, although I'm also convinced that regional circumstances, subtle variations in blue marlin behaviour in different oceans and climates, and migration behaviour in different hemispheres all mean that what might work in one ocean and location may not be the as perfect a technique in another. After reading reports of preferred and successful blue marlin techniques in use from Hawaii, the Azores, Tonga, Africa and Australia's east and west coasts, it becomes obvious that while the use of lures is the overarching starting point for blue marlin angling, there's a fair degree of divergence after that. That said, I think serious blue marlin anglers and skippers need to read as much as they can from successful blue marlin skippers to glean the basics about which techniques to use as a starting point. As most blue marlin fishermen know, while live or skip baiting is clearly the most successful technique used on large black marlin, and a mix (usually depending on the conditions on any given day) of live baiting and lures both work on striped marlin and juvenile blacks, it's generally acknowledged that lure fishing is by far the secret to real success when chasing blue marlin.

And regardless of what some of the detractors of lure fishing think, getting blue marlin up to strike a lure is one of the toughest and rewarding challenges in game fishing. This is the starting assumption articulated. Skippers and anglers should also take a long look through Steve Campbell's benchmark book 'Blue Marlin Magic' before assuming that everything in the Marlin Magazine article will work for them, and then talk to local successful blue marlin anglers before deciding what techniques to use in their campaigns along the edge of Australia's east coast where the blue marlin fishing is some of the toughest, but most rewarding there is. Friday, 10th November. It looks like being a fairly nondescript weekend, and quite likely, another abandoned Solitary Islands GFC competition day. Never say never of course, but after more than a week of moderate to strong southerly winds, it's going to be hideous out there on the edge of the shelf, even if it's half decent on the beach. It's a shame that we still get very little by way of glamour days here.

If one thing is near perfect, you can probably safely assume that another critical game fishing factor will be out of synch and boats will be forced to sit it out. This doesn't mean that a bit of combat fishing isn't a bad idea at times, but you've also got to make the decision on whether you want to blow a load of diesel on marginal conditions with reduced chances of raising fish, or wait until the odds are more in your favour. Saturday will have good tides, an OK moon phase for marlin fishing, excellent current with 24C+ water flowing along the shelf, and likely some serious numbers of blue and striped marlin out there keen to play if only it was calm enough to stir upon some decent surface action. Curiously, after a week of strong winds and a big low passing across the south end of the Tasman, the screen shot from Windguru on the left shows probably the longest swell period I've ever seen here, with the usual 7-10 seconds we see more frequently stretching out to 12-16 seconds, which is really something. A shame there will be a nasty short wind swell overlaying it, because with a groundswell like that, it could be 5 metres high, and as long as there's no wind chop on top of it, not be uncomfortable. In this case, the groundswell's less than 2 metres, so the only uncomfortable part of it will be the wind chop plus the effect of the current pushing into it and thus standing that mess up.

​Fortunately, the forecast for later next week promises several days of excellent fishing weather. So stay tuned. Thursday, 9th November.

One look at these new 24-inch wheels and and you can tell they're pretty special. These are the new Veem propellors that are being fitted to Black N Blue as I type this Logbook entry. Readers will recall that BnB's original props gave up the ghost after being exposed to some pretty extreme electrolysis from a nearby alloy boat that was spewing loose voltage all over the place down at the Coffs marina, and by the time they were removed from the boat, they were basically beyond repair. Veem props are all the go if you're into the absolute latest naval technology, Computational Fluid Dynamics design, 5-axis laser guided milling, and so forth. These props maximise speed, minimise fuel consumption, and for game fishermen, their Sportfishing series minimises cavitation and visible tip vortexes to give you a very clean wake at trolling speeds. Every prop is custom designed and manufactured for each specific boat, engine and mission combination, so whatever boat you run, whatever horsepower you're putting through them, and whatever you do with your boat is all factored in, and only once the company has a full profile do they adapt the design to your boat and go ahead and produce the prop. Nothing off the shelf about these beautiful wheels.

What's not to like (other than the cost of course.)??!! Wednesday, 8th November.

And the screen shot from Windguru pretty m much says it all. Let's hope it changes, but if it doesn't, the Coffs Coast is looking at south to southeast winds which, while not that strong, will sustain sloppy offshore conditions through the weekend and beyond. So instead of dwelling on our lousy weather, some recommended reading from NOAA. ​This isn an article that tells the story of a 1200+lb blue marlin caught off Hawaii in 2009. When the head of the fish was dissected and the otolith bones examined, the fish was found to be only 20 years old. This is pretty remarkable given that large whales can be 100+ years old, and even those big Mangrove Jacks I see lurking under my boat in the marina can live beyond 40 years of age and still only weigh 5-6kg. Tuesday, 7th November. Here we go again.?

Despite excellent water coming down past Coffs in the EAC, the forecast for the next 10 days has constant southeast winds day after day. Not strong enough to make life uncomfortable on the beach, but enough to provide days of the sloppy southeasterly wind swell that makes game fishing on the shelf a totally forgettable experience. Besides, the marlin usually won't bite in those conditions. The screen shot from FishTrack on the left shows just how good the water and current are at the moment, with 25C water off Wooli, and 24.6C water at the Coffs Canyons. And the screen shot on the right shows a pool of 27C water up off Cape Moreton, east of Brisbane.

Pretty unusual to see those sort of temperatures up there at this time of year, and it's sure going to provide some more exciting fishing for the Gold Coast boats in a day or so. Hopefully, it's also pointing to an early start to the serious blue marlin fishing south of the border. That said, if we keep seeing persistent southeasterlies here, it's not going to make much difference.

So, we're once again only slightly removed from good marlin action to our north. They're catching quite a few fish up on the Gold Coast at the moment, continuing a very steady spring bite. We now have the same water that's been producing marlin up there spilling down to the Coffs Coast, and if you look seawards from any high spot of land here, you'll see very nice coloured sub-tropical shades of blue on the horizon - that's the same horizon that's as rough as hell and punctuated by whitecaps. The game fishing good Samaritan award for the month goes to skipper Andrew McClennan from Ballina. He was fishing off the Tweed Canyons and caught a nice blue marlin that had a longliner circle hook in its mouth. Plus the whole trace which the fish had apparently busted off at the clip.

After tagging the marlin, they removed the circle hook (no easy job when its attached to a seriously pissed off marlin) and send it on its way. It would have been easy to just cut the trace and leave the hook there, but they carefully took the hook out, and you can bet that the fish is much better off without it. I know it's my favourite soapbox subject, but the sooner the authorities in Australia totally ban longlining in the Australian EEZ, the better off the marine biomass and the rest of both the sportfishing and local commercial fishing industry will be! There's a very good documentary story available on the web that describes the astonishing top down beneficial effect that rebuilding the peak predator (the wolf) numbers in Yellowstone Park had on the entire Rocky Mountain ecosystem in that part of Wyoming.

It's not drawing too long a bow to suggest that banning longlining in the Australian EEZ and thus starting the rebuilding of the marine food chain would have a similar effect. By eliminating the unsustainable havoc caused by longliners, the peak pelagic fish like sharks, marlin, and tuna could recover to their natural levels, and the flow-on effect right down the biomass would likely be astonishing, not to mention an order of magnitude improvement to the GDP from a resurgent recreational fishing industry ​. Meanwhile, the Solitary Islands GFC had their first competition day on Saturday. The first should have occurred in early September, but almost two months of poor weather has delayed it up to now. It was a great day to be on the water, but sadly, despite once having 200 members and 28 game boats when the club first formed, only four boats set out to fish this competition day.

Just a few years back when the club was first established, there would have been at least a dozen. Anyway, the water conditions were mixed, with the EAC off to the northeast where Foreign Exchange headed to see what was up there. Big mistake.! As things transpired, the action was on the edge of the shelf at the Coffs Canyons, where there was a bit of a marlin convention.

Geeza tagged a nice blue marlin early in the day, and then Alcatraz ended up fighting the things off, going 3 from 5 including a double (that didn't last, but was no doubt pretty exciting for a little while until one of the fish fell off.). By tagging two striped marlin and one blue marlin, the Alcatraz team tagged exactly half the number of competition fish that won the entire season last year. Mind you, it was the worst season on record last year, but tagging half the number of last season's winning fish in just one day does get your attention! Things are looking up for the delayed, but now well underway 2017/18 season. After being totally skunked in the Saturday comp, Foreign Exchange went out again on Sunday to try to redeem a bit of our bruised egos, but once again had a very frustrating day. But at least we raised fish this time - one striped marlin and one blue marlin - but the stripe dithered and never hit a lure despite making three passes at the shotgun, and the blue (hard to be sure, but it behaved like a blue.) hooked up nicely, but then spat the hook after just 30 seconds.

Adding insult to injury, we drove past a couple of circling shearwaters I'd seen from a distance and found a very big blue marlin finning along surfing downswell under the birds. I'd like to think that this fish raised us. It was probably the biggest blue marlin I'd ever seen off Coffs, and the top of the tail fin that was above the surface was every bit of 30 inches long.

The crew reckoned that the tail might have been 6ft from tip to tip! She stayed on the surface until we were about 5 metres away, then slid underneath the lures which were dragged right past her face. Of course, when you're the peak predator out there, nothing scares you, and very little interests you - including our lures. Hell of a sight.! The photos below are screen shots from our Garmin VIRB, with the arrow pointing to the large dorsal just before the second marlin of the day hit the rigger lure, and the second photo shows it a split second later as it strikes. Game fishing.

As everyone knows, hours of droning, moments of excitement! Finally, it seems we may be in line for a fishable competition day here on the Coffs Coast. After almost two months of weather blow-outs, this Saturday's forecast indicates that we may finally be in for a classic summer pattern day, with a light offshore breeze in the morning, swinging to a moderate sea breeze in the afternoon. The East Australian Current is flowing strongly, but is being diverted to the southeast by a large downwelling eddy positioned east of Yamba that has pulled the current away from the edge off the Solitary Islands. The main body of warm (24.5C) water doesn't really start until about 2000 fathoms 25 miles east of South Solitary Island, but there is slightly warmer water about 10 miles closer to shore.

The canyons only have water at about 21.8C on them, and no current. That doesn't mean there won't be fish there, as the striped marlin like those temps, so it will probably be more about bait location than anything else.

While regular game fishermen know only too well what is meant by the term, readers who aren't too familiar with the expression 'bill-wrapped' may be interested in the photo above from the GanderWatch.com website. It's a nice underwater shot of a grander black marlin caught this week off Mozambique, and it's a classic bill-wrap hookup. Marlin often take a slash at prey with their bill, stunning it, or breaking its back so that it becomes immobile when they first strike, after which they circle back and eat it. The fish are deadly accurate, and will usually hit the fish (or in this case, the lure) right across the head, despite the lure moving through the water at a fair clip. Once the fish hits a lure this way, the hook often flips around as the marlin makes its strike and as the bill drags across the leader, the leader will wrap once or twice around the fish's bill, and with any luck, the point of the hook then digs into the bill and the fish is trapped by the hook embedding in the bill. This is actually the best way of doing little or no damage to the marlin, but conversely, it is also one of the least secure ways to hook a fish, because the bill of a marlin is extremely hard keratin material - much like a rhino horn.

No matter how sharp the hook, it's almost impossible for the hook to dig far enough into the bill to sink the barb and thus secure the hook. But the fish will still stay hooked up if there is just one or two wraps of line around the bill keeping the point of the hook securely embedded. However, with only the tip of the hook sticking into the bill, it's not hard to see that if the fish gets any slack line at all during the fight, it only has to shake its head, and this very tenuous hookup will come to nothing as the leader slackens, the wrap unravels, and point of the hook comes free. And of course there's the worst kind of bill wrap that we see quite frequently, when a marlin takes a swipe at a lure, but the trace only takes a couple of wraps around the bill and temporarily locks over itself without the hook actually digging in. These 'hookups' can last anywhere from 3 seconds to 3 minutes, but the outcome in 99% of these bill wraps is for the trace to just slacken off when the fish jumped or turns, and the wrap comes undone. And good bye fish. All too often, we hear of marlin hooking up, and then dropping the hook after everything looked good and the fish has been apparently securely hooked.

When a marlin inexplicably drops off after settling down and the fight progressing normally, the leader will often have the telltale signs of a bill wrap when it's wound back to the boat. I always consider that any angler, skipper, and traceman team who are able to keep steady pressure on a bill-wrapped fish long enough to get it to the boat and tagged have done an excellent job. Other than a battle with a huge fish that can overwhelm an angler, fighting a bill-wrapped fish is a very difficult exercise, where a really careful touch and good skill are needed by the whole team to achieve a successful outcome. Most bill-wrapped fish brought to the boat are easy to release, with the hook usually just falling off the bill as soon as the line is unwrapped, and the fish swimming away with no damage to its mouth. Thursday, 26th October.

So we're 48 hours away from what is shaping up to be the first fishable game fishing club competition day since the season started almost 2 months ago. The EAC is flowing nicely, albeit taking a minor dart out to deeper water as it approaches the Coffs Coast, but it has 25C water in it as it crosses the border to the north, and 24C water abeam Wooli.

The forecast says that both Saturday and Sunday are typically good days for game fishing, so there's a backup should Saturday fall in a heap. Light breezes forecast both mornings, a moderate seabreeze developing each afternoon, but by and large, good days compared to the rubbish weather that's blighted all attempts to get the season kick started so far. Results this week have been mixed from the couple of boats that fished south of the border, with blue marlin caught off Ballina as reported below, but Better than Vegas getting skunked off Coffs a couple of days ago, so it's going to be a real lottery out there with very little to go on other than luck and the skippers' ideas of where fish might be. ​Stay tuned and be ready.

Tuesday, 24th October. As if to verify my thoughts on game fishing just about anywhere north of 30 South as expressed in the Fishtrack screen shot shown in yesterday's entry, Ballina locals Marc Sams and Andrew McClellan decided to take advantage of today's forecast and go and chase marlin in Andrew's new boat. Under the circumstances, their plan was probably flawless. Take the boat up to Tweed Heads, launch it there where everybody has been catching marlin all winter, then fish down south to Ballina.

They drove out into less than stellar conditions, but at least it was fishable, and as soon as they got the the edge of the shelf, things calmed down noticeably. After arriving at the Tweed Canyons and getting the lures out in 150fa in nice blue water at 23.7C, they only had to wait 15 minutes on the run south when they drove straight over two blue marlin, both of which obliged by hooking up - a double blue marlin hookup! ​Hell of a way to start the season. I tell you, the fishing up at the border and beyond continues to impress!

Anyway, with only two of them on board, things got pretty busy, but the two fish settled in, and it was only about halfway through the festivities that Andrew's fish spat the hook after giving a good impression of being solidly hooked up for some time. They eventually got Marc's blue in and tagged and released, but not until it had inflicted the first battle scar on Andrew's brand new gelcoat. The fish was about 2.3m short, which put it around the 110kg mark. Unfortunately, it was bleeding from the gills despite turning up at the boat hooked in the mouth, so it had probably swallowed the lure and the hook might have done a bit of damage before slipping back up its throat and grabbing the jaw. Still, hopefully it will survive and go on to cruise along the NSW coast with all the other blues that seem to be in these pulses of good 24C water that have started to show up on the radar in the last couple of weeks. Well done Andrew and Sam. Neither are members of local Coffs clubs, but any blue marlin south of the border is newsworthy at the moment, and should provide some very real encouragement to local anglers planning to fish this coming Saturday's club competition.

If only of course, this diabolical weather just gives us half a break. It's becoming acutely frustrating watching the forecast for this weekend changing back and forth between fishable and nasty every 24 hours or so for the past week. Once again, it's now gone from good for the weekend yesterday to a nasty southeasterly of over 20 knots from Saturday to Monday, pretty much trashing any game fishing options if it doesn't change for the better. Southeasterlies really are a nasty wind on the Coffs Coast, blowing into the East Australian Current, usually standing the swell up and generating a huge amount of random short period chop that just has boats falling off the back of waves and slapping into short troughs, and that's before you even start to consider the fact that the bite usually shuts down whenever there's a breeze with a southerly component blowing here. Maybe it will change again in the 48 hours remaining before the clubs go out for their scheduled competition day on Saturday. On the glass-half-full side of the page, local game boat Better than Vegas was out today and raised an encouraging collection of fish.

Two striped marlin, one of which just mouthed a lure and left, the other charging in to hit a lure but never hooking up, and that action was punctuated by a hit from a mako shark and a mahimahi. So at least they're out there - and that's despite current flowing uphill, and water temperatures much lower than expected because the pool of great 24C water that had been sitting off the coast had gone. That said, with a forecast that indicates marginally fishable conditions on Friday, a boat that hasn't had a swim for too long, some frustrated anglers who are prepared to give it a go, and encouraged by Better than Vegas' results, Foreign Exchange is planning to get out there for a look before it all goes to hell again. Tuesday, 10th October. This week, Cairns game boat Hellraiser was fishing the outer reef for heavy tackle black marlin and had a helluva day (pun intended.).

The fishing was excellent, but the photos were spectacular, largely thanks to them using a drone to record the action once the fish was close to the boat. There's little doubt that drones are the stepping stone to a new level of awesome game fishing photos and video, and without one, most of what once impressed you about marlin videos and game fishing action is going to seem pretty plain vanilla from now on.

In the two photos below, you can see the drone getting right in the face of the big black marlin as it runs away from the boat at one stage, and the second photo is what the drone was recording - typical of what you get with a drone. You can just imagine what the video is going to look like! I spent some time yesterday afternoon having a sports drink and a chat on the back of Aspro - a 40ft Blackwatch beautifully rigged for game fishing that hails from the south coast of NSW and was paling through Coffs Harbour. The owner, Geoff Brookes, is one of the south coast's better known game fishing charter skippers, and he was taking his boat down home after spending the cooler winter months fishing out of Mooloolaba. While doing what game fishermen do - talking about marlin fishing - Geoff mentioned that the last season on the south coast was the worst he's seen in many years of game fishing, and laid the blame squarely on the two big commercial fishing operations that have the most impact on game fishing on the east coast. Firstly, the large commercial factory trawler Geelong Star spent much of last season fishing for baitfish off the south coast, and in that relatively short time apparently devastated the baitfish stocks to the point where the usual bait balls that attract the striped marlin and YFT simply weren't to be seen anywhere. Of course you don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that the marlin are there on their annual circuit of the Tasman and Coral Seas to feed and breed, and if there's nothing to eat, they'll go elsewhere.

Apparently the days of sitting on the once-plentiful bait balls off Bermagui and looking over the side to see half a dozen blue streaks working the edges of the bait are just a memory, as are the days of catching yellowfin tuna in numbers. Hopefully not a permanent situation. As if that wasn't enough, the longliners are now often setting their lines in just 80 fathoms and catching most of the remaining YFT before the fish travel very far up the coast - certainly before the game boats have a chance to get among what's left of them.

The only bright spot was the appearance of some big bluefin tuna recently, but it hasn't made up for the lack of striped marlin or yellowfin, and so while Aspro used to focus mainly on game fishing charters, they're now doing mostly bottom-bashing trips for the punters. So if these wrecking ball super trawler operators can convince the government to continue to license their giant boats with their giant nets to sweep the pelagic bait off the continental shelf up here on the north coast, it's anyone's guess where the blue and juvenile black marlin will go to find the food that brings them down from the north on their annual passage along the edge of the shelf off Coffs Harbour. But enough negativity. The forecast for next weekend's competition day has improved enough to start looking fishable after originally looking like hell as shown on the Windguru screen shot below. If the improved forecast for next Saturday holds, there should be a reasonable quorum of frustrated game fishermen out there to see what's shaking, and if that recent report from Yamba was the start of a decent bite here, maybe there'll be some good news for a change.

A report from Ballina just to hand from Andrew McLennan. They went out hoping to find the sort of action that Scott Klinger drove into off Yamba, but despite finding very large schools of sauries along the top of the shelf in 35fa, couldn't find any water over 20C, so they pressed on out over the edge.

However, despite driving into 22.5C water out in 250fa, there was no action - no bait, no birds, no dolphins, and certainly no marlin. The consolation prize came in the form of a decent feed of snapper and pearl perch when they stopped to drop a few baits down on one of the reefs, but it was still surprising that there was no billfish action. Sunday, 8th October. The 5-3-0 result off Yamba that I mentioned in the Logbook earlier this week turned out to be one of the Solitary Islands GFC's newest boats, Ghetto, with skipper Scott Klinger out for a day with crew Damien Cliffe. Ghetto is based in Yamba, so it makes sense that they were the first to report some action so far this season. I got the original story second hand and hadn't known to check with Scott, so here's the word directly from the skipper. They obviously had a good day despite not tagging a single fish.

These are the first marlin that I've heard of this season south of the Queensland border, which is most encouraging. Good water and current, and they had 5 fish up in the spread during the day. Four of them were striped marlin that spent a lot of time swatting lures for minutes on end in one case, and when two of them did hook up, it was typical bill-wrap or mouthing stuff, with the fish pulling a bit of string and then dropping off just when they thought there was a solid hookup. The fish that did hook up well turned out to be the only blue marlin of the day (great news that the blues are working their way down.!!), but when they got it close to the boat the line simply went slack and the fish disappeared. They never saw what happened, but when they pulled the line in, it was sliced cleanly just 6 inches down from the swivel - nowhere near the marlin. Bit early for a wahoo, and probably too far away from the marlin to have been a shark. So who knows??

Regardless of the zero result, it was a hell of a day's fishing for a local game boat, and the best day of the season to be reported so far. Saturday, 7th October.

The Windguru screen shot of this week's forecast for the Coffs North Canyons on the left shows the classic Northern NSW coastal forecast dilemma which seems to have been a feature of game fishing here for the past couple of years. A couple of days of near perfect game fishing weather during the working week, with a transition to poor conditions on weekends. This is all very well if you're retired, and if your crew members are either self-employed or retired and therefore free to fish whenever a weather window like this opens up. But for the average angler, the weekday is a workday, and the weekends are for the fun stuff, so it's what's forecast for Saturdays and Sundays that gets their attention. I should note that in the extremely dynamic meteorological environment we live with here, the forecast shown on the left will almost certainly change between now and next weekend, and only rarely does a forecast trend that appears on the timeline a week out ever last and become reality. Compare this to well-known locations with more stable climatic conditions and a far less volatile coastal environment where you can plan an outdoor BBQ, game fishing day, or surfing trip a month in advance.

Like on the southern California coast, where you know it's going to dawn clear and calm with glass-off conditions offshore and only a light sea breeze late in the afternoon month after month. Ditto in Hawaii or almost any other mid-Pacific island, where for at least six months of the year the tradewinds will push through in the afternoon after a tranquil start to the day. It's like Groundhog Day in those places, and having fished and lived in California, Hawaii, Vanuatu, and even Darwin to name a few of those great angling locations with stable and even Groundhog Day climate regularity, I sure do miss them. So far, the Solitary Islands Game Fishing Club has lost roughly 30% of its nominated Saturday competition days here on the Coffs Coast of NSW for the past three years in a row. So far this season, we're running at 100%, although that can only change for the better, and as our season is only one month old, it's hardly a fair statistic. ​And while the underlying climate itself doesn't really seem to be changing in any meaningful way here, the volatility and variability sure seems to be heading upward. The latest satellite shots show 23C water has moved southwards this week and is now sitting off the Solitary Islands.

So if any boats do get out during the calmer days forecast for later this week, maybe some of that action reported off Yamba midweek will be waiting out there for them. Thursday, 5 October. With regular reports of marlin being caught off Fraser Island by well-known Gold Coast boat Mistress, it's pretty much a sure thing that the fish are concentrated up there waiting for a breakthrough. This will inevitably happen, but in the meantime, the occasional isolated burst of action does take place when we get a pulse of good water that washes down the edge of the continental shelf as far south as northern NSW. It's now about the time of year when intermittent reports of blue marlin being raised south of the Queensland border start to filter through, and while it may be a false start, a report today of a boat out of Yamba finding good water and going 5-3-0 on mystery marlin, with one confirmed blue lost near the boat is extremely encouraging.

We may have had more confirmation if Hemingway hadn't popped a cooling water hose on the way out of the harbour at Coffs this morning. While it earned skipper Marcus Blackwell a mention in this season's Golden Paddle awards after he was towed back to harbour, it looks like his trouble was only a sticking cap release valve on the coolant tank, and that the engine wasn't fried. With glamour days like today and yesterday going begging without anybody out there dragging lures around, this is exactly the time of year when the possibilities are endless and the game fleet skippers start to get a bit antsy waiting for a few fishable days on weekends when crew are available. Tuesday, 3rd October. I've had a bit of feedback about the water colour and quality issues I've been whining about below, and the Ekman effect that is at the heart of it.

You can read about. Many people simply want to put it down to floodwater plumes from coastal rivers, or algal blooms, which in many cases the water discolouration seen along the continental shelf can in fact be.

But when there's been no rain for weeks and the algae and chlorophyl blooms do not show up on the satellite images, the only culprit is the rolling over of the shelf water which results from continuous northerly winds. I thought I'd just try to show how stark the contrast can be by going back through my photo library to some of the extremes on the colour scale. The photos of brown water were taken last week, and the cobalt 'marlin blue' shots interspersed were taken at various times over the past couple of years on the sort of day that lifts your spirits and takes your breath away. No photoshopping here either.

While there have been no attention-grabbing news items relating to game fishing off the Solitary Coast this past week, at least daylight summer time has arrived. The extra hour that game fishermen gain to fish their summer schedule means that competitions start and finish in a better daylight window that still allows them to get back to the marina, clean their boats up, and get to the Marlin Bar during daylight hours.

Not that the fish care mind you, but there's a lot to be said for starting daily competitions closer to dawn while the fish are still hungry and looking for early action. This weekend past I've been working with a new game fishing club software package from itsfishing.com. This is a very handy program that allows a club to maintain membership databases, scoring programs, tournament operations files, and all manner of information all in a package that uses its own cloud storage to allow club administration and its members to access a huge amount of information, including pointscores, and will shortly allow (via a soon-to-be-released mobile phone app) anglers to log on to check tournament scores in real time. In a few months, they should even be able to check out the position in real time of other boats in the club fleet, much like they can at the moment using the AIS system.. And what's happening out there on the edge of the continental shelf.? Nothing to report, but there might be a boat or two heading out later this week if the forecast holds.

The countdown to the first marlin of the season is now on. Maybe clubs should have a special award for this.

It might see crews get into it sooner. Alcatraz travelled from Yamba to Coffs Harbour today, but didn't fish. However, skipper James McGinty saw plenty of surface bait on the way down, so given that there was none at all out there a few days ago, this is a positive sign, and with a lot of rain overnight, 24C water off the northern NSW coast, and reasonable current flow, next weekend's good forecast could encourage some boats to go out and fish in pretty positive conditions. Tuesday, 26th September. We ran Foreign Exchange down from Yamba to Coffs Harbour yesterday.

The forecast was less than encouraging, but we pushed out over the Clarence River bar anyway, and drove into a nasty ocean that was rough, green, totally uninviting, and more or less unfishable thanks to a strong northerly and a 2-3 metre groundswell. And it was empty. Or at least that's what it seemed. If conditions had been better, there might have been marlin, but they weren't coming up to play on the surface in that lot. After several hours of being rolled around and watching lures flying out of the waves with no sign of bait or surface activity, a 2kg striped tuna with lofty ambitions hooked up on a Jennings Flyer lure with an 8/0 hook that should never have fitted into its mouth. Even after the weather finally calmed down to a less blustery 15 knots, we arrived off the Coffs Coast to find that the last few days of northerly breezes had induced a strong Ekman effect, and the water inside 50 fathoms had rolled over.

We were driving through brown/green sludge that was the worst colour we'd ever seen out there. So we pulled the gear in and motored into Coffs. The weather continues to thwart attempts to get the game fishing season started here, and much more of these all-too-familiar conditions will have a dire effect on the already low morale of Coffs game fishermen. Hopefully, this too will pass. The average game fisherman is always trying to consider the multiple factors that seem to have an influence on the way the big fish we chase behave.

While many of these factors such as weather, food, ocean temperatures and currents are pretty much a no-brainer, they're just some of the things under the 'environment' umbrella that we don't always take full advantage of. In this case, let's talk about the structure of the ocean floor. We all know that the sub-surface terrain is a big part of the game fishing puzzle, and everyone with a sounder, a GPS plotter and a local marine map database knows that undersea structure often has a huge effect on the presence of marlin, particularly when that structure interacts with currents, tides, and bait aggregations.

Undersea structure can hold bait, cause nutrient upwellings, provide protection, or even possibly (as is already suspected with migratory patterns) provide landmarks and waypoints that appear to have been used by the collective 'memory' of whales and other oceanic species as they move around the oceans of the world. Contemporary GPS plotters use digital databases that can often be hopelessly out of date if they've just been sitting in your plotter for a year or two without updating. And while this didn't used to be such a big deal given the paucity of reliable information and the currency of undersea terrain data just a decade ago, this has changed very much in recent years. Telecharger Patch Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge Ps3 Release. There are oceanic survey ships that gather 3D seafloor terrain data in unheard of quantities, with astonishing accuracy, every time they go to sea. Other shipping and even recreational vessels with the latest generation of sounders and plotters also store information about every metre of seafloor they pass over and then upload that to central databases every time the vessel owner plugs the plotter chip into a reader back home.

Think about the recent search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 which disappeared over the Indian Ocean a couple of years back. There have been Australian, Dutch, Malaysian and Chinese search vessels mapping every inch of the ocean floor out there along the projected flight path for two years after the aircraft disappeared. These vessels were using very sophisticated 3D mapping sonar to record every rock out there, and while they unfortunately didn't find the jet, they collected some of the most accurate midocean floor mapping data ever collated. Like all the other undersea terrain data collected from multiple sources every day, much of this ends up in databases that are accessible to the companies that sell us the map chips for our plotters.

Most organisations that produce map data for our plotters now put out daily updates that can be written onto the map cards we use anytime we take them home and care to plug them in. For example, the Navionics card I use is able to access new data every day, and each data set shows minor improvements, all gleaned from everything from specialised hydrographic survey ships to recreational boats cruising around out there. Over the space of even just a month, more detailed contour and structure data slowly appears on the seafloor charts after the raw data from all these sources is massaged and incorporated into the database. So if you're not using a current plotter chipset that displays the latest seafloor data and which can be updated frequently using the constantly improved database available to the companies providing these cards for our plotters, you're really missing out. All is not lost. Another user of the same seafloor database with its constantly upgraded information is Google.

So even if you don't have one of the latest data cards in your plotter, or if you don't subscribe to an update service, you should spend a couple of hours looking over the Oceans subset of Google Earth. You might be astonished by what you see there. Ridges, canyons, huge valleys and complex seafloor structure that the data cards from the last generation of navigation plotters simply never showed us. You can sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and make a list of all the surprising structure that you never knew was out there in your local piece of ocean, or which you've been unable to visualise even with the latest seafloor data. You can then add these marks to your plotter library. Google Earth puts all this wealth of data into an easily understood presentation that you can pick over and take notes of the location of the sort of structure you think might help you find marlin. It won't be as accurate as the 1m contours you'll find on the latest datasets from Navionics and others, but the detail is still adequate to help you plan trips and vis.