Manukau / Auckland West Coast

As a part of Countries Sport Fishing Club, I get to help organise some of our fishing competitions. Mostly I’m involved in the Grunter Hunter – a gurnard only comp that regularly attracts 300 or more anglers all hoping to get some of the prizemoney on offer.

It has certainly been an unusual year. Like everyone else I would have expected a whole lot more settled weather over autumn, and now that winter is finally here, I would have expected to have seen a whole lot more cooler weather.

It has been a long time between reports, my apologies for that but it isn’t always easy to get a decent report out. I recently met up with a Fishing World reader – Gareth from West Coast Boat Wraps. I have seen his work and it is pretty good stuff.

It’s been a long time between reports for me, which is a bit naughty especially as I’ve done my share of fishing lately. The ever reliable west coast hasn’t let us down and it seldom does in springtime. One recent trip had some hectic fishing on baits and jigs for some very good fish up to 8kg, then a couple of weeks later with a new fishfinder/chartplotter with no marks whatsoever saved we repeated that trick in even faster time despite just stopping in a random spot in 58m. The difference was in the size of the fish, nothing over 3kg, but that isn’t a bad thing at all.

The weather hasn’t been kind enough to tempt me out fishing lately but to make up for that I’m going somewhere this weekend that everyone should try to fish at some stage of their life, the Ranfurly Banks. While that has nothing to do with fishing the Manukau harbour and surrounds at least I’ll be looking forward to some more leisurely snapper and gurnard fishing when I get back after putting up with those big arm stretching fish down East Cape way!

Winter fishing, why do we do it? It’s always cold, often raining and usually a combination of the two. It can also be quite productive. My son Arron and I spent last weekend fishing the CSFC.co.nz Ice Breaker competition. We targeted snapper & gurnard in the Manukau harbour.