Our Epic Day out with Toby

Report from Mark Wakelin, luckly recipient of a day trip on Sanity donated at a recent Great Barrier Island Fishing Net weekend

On Thursday 28th of October Pebbles and I drove to Whitianga to take up our trip with Toby of Epic Adventures, which Pebbles had won for “ Best dressed pirate” during the fishing net Barrier get together at Karp’s place. We met Toby at Smittys sports bar for a couple of quiet beers, and a catch up, and hatched a plan to meet at Whitianga wharf at 06:30 in the morning.

Friday the 29th of October dawned fine with light winds in Whitianga, and after a quick breakfast we were off to meet Toby at the Whitianga wharf to catch live baits. We arrived at the wharf just on 06:30, and “Sanity” was making her way around to the wharf. After an hour of catching live baits on Uncles excellent Sabiki rigs, ( I must get some of those), we were off out to the Alderman’s to try our luck, and hopefully pop my cherry, as I hadn’t ever caught a legal Kingy.

We arrived at the pin around 07:30, to be met by Carl from Epic in Tairua, with a crew of 4 aboard, arriving at around the same time. Toby rigged our baits and told us to drop them down 5 colours, (50 metres ) as that’s where the Kings were showing on the sounder, and not to strike when we first felt the bait get taken. After a couple of false starts, with no takers, we moved around again, and Pebbles was first to hook up, and eventually landed a nice 15Kg Kingy, and then another of a similar size before I was even on the board. Finally my turn came, and I hooked up, and felt the power of a decent Kingy, which I eventually landed and went approximately 15 KG. All the while Toby was working his butt off, tracing the fish, driving the boat, baiting the hooks, taking photos, and generally making it a great experience for us.

Several more Kings were caught by both of us, including a 25 KG fish, which damn near broke my already sore left arm with its power. If you have never experienced the power of these fish befor, as in my case, nothing can prepare you for how powerful they are.

The biggest fish of the day was unfortunately lost, as Pebbles couldn’t stop it getting to the reef and busting her off. Another lesson learned was 24KG braid is not strong enough for some of these monsters, as Pebbles had the braid part twice on her reel, so Toby kindly lent her his set up, which is now going to cost me an arm and a leg, as she just loved the JM PE5 reel he uses, and she has it firmly on her birthday list. We will also have to look at spooling our reels with 37 KG if we want to successfully tackle these beasts again.

After several Kingy’s I was stuffed, so decided to try for snapper on my soft bait outfit to give my arm a rest. After several fruitless attempts at coaxing a bite with unscented softies, I put on a gulp, but only succeeded in losing the jig head to a barracuda. I then tried slow jigs and managed only a rat kingy. Meanwhile Toby had fired out a pilchard bait on his little Synit / Stella outfit, and Pebbles reeled in a nice 6 KG snapper on it, easily a PB for her. Last but not least, I caught a pup Hapuka on Toby’s outfit. By this time it was 3 o’clock, and the fishing had slowed to a crawl, and the Kingy’s had also lost interest, so we moved on and tried another reef on the way in, but with no luck.

Thanks to Toby and Epic Adventures for putting up this trip, and thanks for putting up with us. We have decided to make time to do at least one of these trips a year now, even though we have our own boat. I would highly recommend that if you get the chance to do one of these trips with Epic charters you jump at it, because it’s an awesome experience you won’t ever forget.

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