Fishing the reef can involve moving around a lot and with the average offshore boat is too big for an electric and too small for an anchor winch.
The result is a never ending back breaking task of retrieving your anchor!
Unless you have a fit deckie, continually weighing anchor can get a bit tedious and on a social trip it’s easy to get lazy and not want to move – thus reducing catches as you end up fishing near enough but not ON the fish.
Back in the days of my reef charters I would sometime move up to 20 times if the situation was not ideal for drifting.
OMG glad those days are over haha.
But to avoid all that you can use a float to do the heavy lifting for you!
They are readily available at most boat chandlerys and simply slip onto your rope and slide down as you drive off.
Watch for the float to disappear under the surface – this indicates it has locked on to your anchor stem.
Then return picking up the slack rope as you go. Easy!
On this particular day with my mate Ruffy we landed around 40 odd coral trout – releasing many of them as they were caught in shallow water.
If you’re into fishing offshore, the following blog posts might be of interest to you!
