This trip was with a group of keen anglers from Canberra in Australia. This was a dory trip, and not utilising the floatplane. The trip was organised by Santino Di Carlo, and we had guys from all over the place onboard. David Green of Fishing world Magazine Fame was also onboard for another Coral Sea Trek. It was to be David's first Coral Sea trip in 15 years, since the old Seafari days, and it was obvious he was excited.
The first day at Bird Island started well, with a number of big Red Bass, coral Trout and the odd GT. The guys fishing with Scott Bannerot raised 6 sailfish in the dory in a few hours and had a couple hooked up on stickbaits. Santino got smoked by a big doggie on the first day at the Bird Island dropoff and there was plenty of action.
The 2nd and 3rd days were rather slow by Coral Sea standards, with a few nice 20kg GTs released, plenty of Red Bass and Coral Trout, but the lagoon fishing was a little slow. The weather was also quite windy which kept us from exploring the deeper reefs, but usually the GT fishing in the lagoons is spectacular in these conditions.
We kept moving around and on the 4th day we found why there was no bait in the lagoons, the wahoo had eaten it all. We found what was to be one of the hottest bites any of us had ever experienced. In 2.5 days fishing we released around 250 wahoo, with the standard size being 30-40kgs. We figure there were around 1000 bites/hookups in this time, and fishing with spin gear, jigs, stickbaits and poppers was some of the most exc iting fishing any of us had ever seen.
It was common to see wahoo hit a surface lure and rocket 10 feet out of the water. Kenny from Malaysia was lucky to be in one piece when a 40kg wahoo nailed his stick bait at the boat and rocketed head first into the motor cowling, missing his feet by about 30cm!!!
The method of fishing was to troll deep minnows, or anything actually, then as soon as you hooked up just stop the boat and start casting stick baits and jigs. Most of the time we couldn't troll more than 2 minutes without hooking up, it was truly the wahoo bite of the century.
Mixed in with the mass of wahoo were sailfish, a few good sized dogtooth tuna and some nice yellowfin tuna in the 30kg size. The yellowfin Tuna loved hitting stick baits on the surface and it was truly wild action to see yellowfin and wahoo racing for the same lure and nailing it at the boat!
All I can say is that the fishing in the last half of this week was beyond belief. It's another world out there, and this fishing just proved that travelling to the Coral Sea is like taking a trip to another planet.
See you out there.
 All material copyright Nomad Sportfishing Adventures 2007
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