Pirates Invade Coffs & Wooli

Words by Nick Clark AKA Captain Feathersword

August can be a bit of a 'hit & miss' month for fishing off Sydney...so what does a clever fisho do during this cold & shitty month... Head north!
LRPC member Nick "Feathersword" Clark, and one of his keen fishing buddies Sonny Gordon had a great weekend of fishing recently when they headed up the NSW mid north coast in search of some quality winter fish - below is a run down of their weekend.
We got up to Coffs Harbour late Friday evening and checked in at the trailerboat friendly Chelsea Motor Inn. A fresh and shitty southerly was blowing hard and a fair sea running, we just slept in on satday morning. We grabbed a nice cooked brekky in town, then hit the awesome Fishing Tackle Australia tackle shop - a fishermans heaven and a bank account emptier indeed! After a good 3 hours in the tackle store, and with the ocean conditions slowly improving, we decided to launch the boat, and, with a backing southerly things were looking ok...

Feathersword with a beautiful Coffs morning red

An hour or two spinning the back breakers around Sawtell saw a heap of solid mack tuna in the esky for bait purposes - these little tuna pull hard on snapper gear and warm up the drags nicely. Happy with the easily obtained bait, next stop was a couple of inshore snapper reefs where we threw plastic about for only one reasonable snapper around 2.5kg - a bit slow for these waters. Scratching our heads and with just the one fish onboard , we devised a plan to head wider for an after dark stint on the local teraglin populations and this plan didn't let us down!  A quick and easy bag limit of tasty trags followed.  We pulled the anchor and punched back into Coffs boat ramp easily with the glow of the full moon illuminating our path.
Tomorrow was going to be big...an early start at Wooli with glass off conditions on the forecast.  A feed at the pub, a couple of beers and a bit of tackle play, then off to bed for some zzzz's.

Seven and a bit hours push up the Pacific Hwy lies the sleepy town of Wooli - a cracker of a little town, typical of the north coast where not much happens apart from great fishing and surfing.

Feathersword Hooked up to a nice King on the new Bonnici JM special

6am launch and out through Wooli bar onto a pancake flat sea had us stoked!  Running down the coast, first stop was a nice bombora where we cast plastics for snapper.  We got a lovely four and a bit kilo fish on the second or third cast, but not another snapper could be tempted from the shallow reef...time for a new game plan!

WE were salivating at a shot at fishing a lump of reef on the edge of the shelf east of Wooli that some fellow pirates had fished just weeks prior with great results...so we fired up the etec and pushed the trusty Haines centre console east.
Upon arrival the sounder readings looked epic - plenty of kingfish showing midway, and a carpet of reef fish lining the rugged sea floor.

Healthy Menacing Wooli King 

Long story short - we pulled ( and released ) as many school sized 5 - 9kg kings as you could possibly want on the jigs. They were so easy - it was a perfect opportunity to test out the new JM rods built by fellow pirate Mike Bonnici.
Once we were over catching kings we sent some fresh strips of tuna to the bottom...honker pearl pearch over 4kg, plate size to 3kg snapper, large teraglin, xos nannygai and all types of other ooglies and bust ups made for a fun time and a tasty box of fish.

Massive 4kg pearly....Arrrrgh!!!

What a place! Back at the Wooli ramp, a chat with some friendly locals revealed that just about everybody caught some nice fish that day and it was smiles all round as we drove back to Coffs - very happy but completely buggered from a monster session.
So, when things are slow in Sydney...theres nothing like getting away in a trailerboat ...either up or down our great coastline.
THE END