by Tristan Taylor
I was lucky enough to make a quick trip to Townsville in early December and boy did we make the most of the fishing on offer. Heading out of Townsville Harbour towards a few shoals in 30-40 metres was the plan for the day. We threw plastics almost exclusively and were greeted with a mixed bag of trevally, mackerel, queenfish and tuna.
The tactic for the day was to find rubble patches with bait in the 30 metre depth range and pepper these areas with plastics. The Atomic Seekers 3/4-1oz jighead in size 6/0 hook was teamed with the Atomic Plazo 6″jerk minnow in Ghost Pearl and allowed to settle on the bottom before a couple of very quick and erratic rips through the water column. A lot of the time a hook up was achieved just sinking the Plazo through the bait schools before even reaching the bottom! We caught GT, bludger trevally, bullet trevally and golden trevally from deep amongst the bait schools and were bitten off countless times by marauding spanish mackerel. We did manage to get a few of the smaller mackerel in, but without fishing wire were at the mercy of the gods.
On the drive to and from the shoals we encountered numerous schools of feeding tuna and lobbed the lighter weighted plastics at them, catching half a dozen large mack tuna. Great fun on 20lb Unitika braid and Samurai 402 rods!
The key for the day whether catching tuna or trevally was to find the bait schools.
