Our latest Trip Report to Wreck Reef from the 3rd - 15th August is as follows:-
Click HERE to check out Wreck Reef on our location guide
Click HERE to watch some video action from Wreck Reef
We visitited Wreck Reef as part of our Coral Sea Ultimate Adventure Trips
Summary -
Wreck Reef cemented itself firmly on the Nomad Itinerary with this trip. We also filmed the whole week and there will be a DVD available before Christmas called ''Wrecked on Wahoo''. We'll put it on the website when it is available, but we can't tell you when just yet.
We went to Wreck in August 2006 and found what we believed to be a spawning aggregation of wahoo. This trip in 2007 proved the aggregation to be an annual event, with huge numbers of big wahoo on the chew. We were chasing them on fly this year - you just get sick of releasing them on conventional gear, there are that many! We hooked 35 on fly in one day, and our biggest for the trip on conventional gear was over 50kgs. Oh, there were also plenty of black marlin, sailfish, yellowfiun tuna and some BIG GTs on the chew as well. Sounds like just another day in the Coral Sea really!!!! We had Gavin Platz from Tie n Fly Outfitters on the Sunshine Coast along for the week as our resident flyfishing guru. Gav is also one of our regular guides, and is a master flyfisherman, which he again proved on this trip.
We actually brought him along to tie flies and bring plenty of gear with him, seeing as he owns a fly shop. Gavin was up very late every night tying flies. I hate to even imagine how many flies we lost, but Gavin brought 35 flies with him, and was tying furiously after the 2nd day. I just can't imagine anywhere on the planet with more big wahoo than this place. We were fishing GFAA 30lb tippets, so we could release the fish quickly, but for anyone interested in a world record wahoo on fly, this is the place. The smallest fish are 60lbs and the biggest are well over 100lbs - massive wahoo!
Report
We arrived at Wreck Reef a few days before the charter was to start, having steamed south from the newly discovered Bugatti Reef fishery. It was a little windy, but as soon as Ed arrived from Hervey Bay in the 36ft Blackwatch we were off to check out if the wahoo were still here. I can assure you that there was some degree of trepidation and unease amongst the crew as we set off on the first day.
Would the Wahoo be here this year??? We all hoped so.
Literally within 3 minutes of setting the teasers we had Gavin hooked up to the first wahoo on fly for the trip, and he even landed it!!! Amazing stuff. It was a solid wahoo around 30kg, and it would have taken a sledghammer to wipe the smiles off the faces on the back deck of the blackwatch. The wahoo were in town and let the games begin.
The following hour saw us raise a ridiculous number of wahoo, I have no idea how many, but we had 2 sailfish, 2 doggies and 1 marlin up and actually landed 3 wahoo on fly. We had 2 double hookups on fly with wahoo, and it was just the craziest hour of fishing we've ever seen. It was a simple routine. Put something in the water, and it got eaten! That easy.
Now, I'm going to have to change the format of this trip report, because we saw thousands of wahoo on this trip, and you'll be sick of hearing me describe how we teased our 300th wahoo for the week and hooked up yet another one, had yet another triple hookup on fly and got busted off by another wahoo. So I'm going to have a talk about a few highlights and a few techniques that worked. Suffice to say that on the fishing front it was just silly, nuts, crazy and any other adjective you can think of. There were that many big wahoo and other critters there that you could have walked on them and the fishing was as mind blowingly sensational as you would expect with that many big hungry fish around. The interesting thing here is that when you get to see that many fish in a week, the learning curve is huge. The ideal techniques and methods changed by the hour, the more we learned.
Teasing
Not how you would think - I can assure you. We learned a lot about wahoo last year at Wreck Reef, and we started out with a few pretty good ideas of how to tease these fish, and we were mostly on the mark. The spread we started with consisted of a daisy chain of squid, with a bird at the front and a stickbait chain at the back. This drives the wahoo nuts like you would not believe. The Nomad Stickbaits are the absolute best teaser for these wahoo, it drives them absolutley crazy.
This daisy chain was run off the rigger, with a moldcraft chugger with a belly strip of tuna on long corner. This was there for the sailfish and marlin that invariably come along. The only problem is that the wahoo love the belly strip, and the moldcraft lures end up looking like a toilet brush after a short time. We used nearly 20 moldcraft chuggers in a week!
The other secret teaser weapon was a 100lb spin rod with a deep diving minnow attached. The minnow was fitted with a single hook on the tail. This was used when we wanted to get a wahoo hooked up on the minnow.
Now, the thing here is that wahoo are a pack fish, they feed in packs and when one fish gets excited so do the whole pack, so there are times when getting one of the pack hooked up and excited is very desirable, as this then gets the rest of the pack excited and they nail everything in sight, including the fly you have just cast out the back of the boat.
We didn't use the teaser minnow all the time, but any time when the fish were not 100% on the chew, or a bit lethargic, getting a minnow down 15 metres from the surface and just getting one of the pack hooked up and excited saw us hook heaps of fish on fly that we would never have otherwise seen. You see, when the fish were on the surface nailing everything in sight and all the surface teasers are getting smashed left right and centre, we did not deploy the teaser minnow. But the number of fish that we caught on fly where the only indication of a pack of fish was the hit on the teaser minnow, was amazing. I believe that we caught 30-40% more wahoo because we used this teaser minnow at the right time and in the right way.
This is not a technique that we would recommend for most other species, but for wahoo and dogtooth tuna it is an excellent way to get fish that may be a bit quiet to come up and eat a fly. You can watch the full tackle segment in the ''Wrecked on Wahoo" DVD which will be released before christmas. We filmed the whole week, and it was spectacular.
Flies
We have Gavin to thank for much of what we learned about flies. His ability to tie new designs every night and trial new ideas on the spot was invaluable. The summary of what we learned was that you need 2 flyrods rigged at all times and ready to cast. One rod has a flashy profile tube fly rigged with a pair of 10/0 gamakatsu SL12S hooks on wire. This fly is used to cast to the teased fish as we bring in the teasers. Basically this fly gets used when you have some assistance from boat movement just after it is taken out of gear. The tube fly must be somehow fixed to the hooks so it can't slide up the shock tippet. We lost a lot of fish to bite offs this way. And to show you how ravenous these fish are, we had a 35kg fish that literally had half it's head cleavered off by another wahoo charging in and nailing the fly flailing around the hooked fish's head. It is a brutal world in there.
The other fly you need is a single hook flashy profile fly connected to the shock tippet with some sort of loop knot. This fly is used casting and retrieving down the cube trail after the boat has stopped and we are casting a teaser stickbait and cubing on the drift. The single hook flashy profile fly looks much better in the water, casts better and simply catches more fish when you are relying on the the anglers strip to put the action in the fly.
We also discovered that you need at least a 14wt rod and a good quality 700 grain shooting head line for this type of action. Anything else is too light.
Now there's a lot more to the fly strip, the teasing and the gear than what we've said here, but Gavin and our team will be more than happy to show everyone how it's done out on the water in 2008. There are only 20 places available, so get in quick.
Highlights of Wreck Reef 2007 Apart from so many triple and double hookups of wahoo on fly that I still can't comprehend it, and the most insane wahoo action we've ever heard of, there was some other great catches made for the week. Jason Preece was guiding the crew from Ultimate Fishing DVDs, and the free DVD on the cover of the December Fishing World magazine will be all about fishing at Wreck Reef, so keep an eye out for that one. Mark Berg (the presenter) was connected to a couple of GTs nudging 50kgs, and Jason was also fishing, and unfortunately lost a big GT around 50kgs.
Tim had John Clarke and Mark Joseph on one of the 18ft skiffs and managed a 35kg dogtooth tuna and got connected to a 45kg GT all in one day. There were a couple of afternoons where the guys saw between 11-12 GTs for the arvo.
Our hostess Cally swam with a humpback whale which swam past the back of the boat at our Anchorage at West Islet!!! Truly spectacular.
Mark Joseph landed a 120kg bronze whaler on his 13wt flyrod. It ate a fly in amongst the cube trail. A spectacular effort on a flyrod.
Ed took the Blackwatch out for a spin and landed a 70kg sailfish on conventional gear, and there was also a run of 30-40kg yellowfin, with lots of them busting the surface in patches. They would have been a great popper target if the wahoo hadn't gotten in the way.
All that is really left to say is that this trip proved that Wreck Reef has to be one of the most prolific bluewater flyfishing locations on the planet. We released somewhere around 60 wahoo on fly, from somewhere around 250-300 hookups on the flyrod, from thousands of fish seen. There's just something truly addictive about flyfishing for the fastest fish in the sea. Seeing those fly reels spin as fast as any fish can make them go is just spectacular.
I simply can't wait to get back there next year. The thought that there may be even more fish there next year is scary. Maybe it'll only take 2 minutes to get the first hookup next year, maybe only 5?? One thing for sure is that it'll be some of the best bluewater flyrod action in the world for 2008. Hope to see you out there.
Damon Olsen and the Nomad Crew.
All material copyright Nomad Sportfishing Adventures 2009
