Waitemata Harbour is a great fishery, cheap, accesible and close to home. The harbour is filling up with spawning snapper at the moment, but yesterday's mission was about kingfish and fly rods. We wanted to at least get out and about after the aborted Waikaremoana trip, so the loose plan was to meet up at TT's, load the boat and get down to Okahu Bay and meet with Garth Planck who would join us. Garth's a well known competition angler who is trying to make the NZ team for the world champs. He reckons its his lake fishing that he needs to touch up on. I have my own thoughts about fishing competitions. Somehow sitting on the bank of a stream, smoking a ciggie and watching a fish feed seems to me to be a bit more 'in tune' than covering every mm of water with methodical no second wasted time bound precision of the top guys. Each to their own. One thing I do know about fishing around obstacles for kings is that presentation of the fly has to be accurate - it doesn't really matter how you get the fly just deep enough just upstream of the obstacle - only that you get it there. Waitemata is known for afternoon breezes, which tend to be steady and make casting tricky, so any manipulation of back-hand, over head, or roll cast to drop the fly in the zone will do. It will have to do. T-14 isn't exactly designed for pretty casting anyhow. Its designed to sink like a half brick. We headed out to a well known rock between 2 islands, got in postition which was tricky and after a couple of casts I was on. With the current and wind TT was having a hell of a job keeping the boat in place and we drifted across the buoy chain... fish 1 angler nil. After a few minutes we decided to anchor and dropped the pick. The position wasn't great but it was manageable and a few minutes and a couple of pack attacks later I was on again. But as I was standing on the line that fight didn't last long.... Garth meantime didn't have any action.
After a few more minutes TT wanted to reposition, but in doing so we hooked the pick on the buoy chain and had to jettison it after a bit of toing and froing. Bye bye $200. We decided to move back into Rangi Channel and check out the action there. First up the marker pole. Nothing doing. So we began to buoy hop and began to find fish. At almost every buoy at least one and sometimes up to half a dozen rats would chase the fly out. The Megamushy got eaten a few times and it was nice to get on the board; Garth meantime began to suffer from the dreaded mal de mer and his efforts flagged. I gave him a fly that would get bitten; his flies were a bit too bulky. The fish were all rats, nothing I saw would have exceeded 4 kilos or so.
We ended the day at Rough Rock - a new buoy is attached there and its pretty 'clean' -no barnacles or weed growth on it yet. One small king came out and made a half arsed pass at the fly. Then we wound in. Inumerable casts, 4 hookups, 2 landed, heaps seen. Sweet.
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