It was decided that a trip to Noosa for another fishing fix was needed. Arriving from Brisbane around 8.30pm Wednesday night, no time was wasted in getting the boat and gear readied for the following day's morning session. Crossing the bar at 5am Thursday morning, we headed straight to Sunshine Reef, where we caught a fair amount of sweetlip on our 1-2kg spin gear. Needless to say, we got dusted quite a few times by fish obviously bigger than the 30-40cm sweetlip we had been landing.

It was well into the morning when we left the reef and headed back into Laguna Bay - we probably lingered on Sunshine Reef a touch too long with the last 45 minutes yielding nothing for our determination. During our trip back across the bay, we noticed tuna travelling in small groups - sometimes in duos, chasing baitfish while continuously moving. This made presenting a slug to them extremely difficult and in the end we gave up and hoped for better tuna fishing in the following days.

Just before crossing back into the river, we decided to have a flick in the breakers adjacent to the bar, we had a few hits and hook ups and ultimately discovered the culprits with Toby landing a slightly better sized GT. The mid day session was spent chasing a few flathead around the Frying Pan and up Weyba Creek with the afternoons spent probing Woods Bays with poppers, plastics and flies for the trevally and tailor that are synonymous with the area. First cast with a Rebel Teeny Pop-R resulted in a nice GT to Toby, who ended the evening with a dozen or so on surface. I persisted with my seven weight fly rod and, using gurglers and poppers, managed to get two nice trevs into the boat.

The following two days followed much the same pattern albeit the tuna were a little more co-operative on the second and third days. Mack tuna provided the entertainment Friday morning by blind casting slugs to areas recently witnessed to the action packed feeding frenzies of the fish.

Saturday produced a bit better quality with a larger caliber of mack tuna hitting the deck as well as a 10kg longtail tuna I managed to land after a monumental 45 minute battle on my 4-7kg G.Loomis Jerkbait Rod matched with a zillion 50th anv. edition with 15lb Daiwa sensor braid. We caught these tuna by casting Spaniard Maniacs and Rio's 20g slugs to the tight bait balls pushed up against the beach along North Shore. I had hooked a much bigger tuna before landing the aforementioned only to have the hooks fall out 40 minutes into the fight. That fish was seriously big, and constant chasing was required just to stop being spooled. At times it even pulled the boat along with it! It was only after we'd experienced the brute strength of these tuna that we realized our gear was a touch under gunned. We left the tuna bust ups content with the one longtail capture and headed back into the river for a bit more flathead spinning before calling it quits and heading back to Brisbane.
Written by Tom Clancy