Since the Albacore Tournament we've thankfully seen an improvement in the weather, still plenty of lows scooting thro' but longer settled intervals .

Still mainly doing day reef trips, but I've checked out a few areas further East than we've been for awhile.

Maketu has been producing some quite nice tarakihi and we tried a bit deeper and also had some encouraging signs, with the odd snapper in amongst them,

The deeper water[over 80m] is still pretty fickle, enough so that we've spent more time around the shallower reefs than normal. Although this is a bit more the pattern we wereseeing a few years ago.

We did an overnighter to Mayor with some of my long time regulars on the 23rd/24th and it was an average trip. Our night fish produced no snapper-or anything else. The day following day started off really well, with mainly tarakihi coming up in good numbers, better size than we've been seeing too. But............ after a couple of hours they pretty well shut up shop for the day.I covered depths from 20 to 120m with the same result i.e. almost nothing. Still, the couple of hours made it  ok but our next o/nighter on the following Sat/Sun we went to Motiti.

A 25-30 knot Westerly made it a pretty easy decision, side slop to mayor or comfortable following sea. It turned out to be a good decision,as the boys from Northpower, Putu, Trevor and Co  had a good evening fish, snapper up to 3kg, and quite good numbers as well.

The next day at Town Pt we got onto the tarakihi and they were going quite hard too.

It was one of those days where they ticked along steadily for pretty well the whole day and all depths  worked well.

Monday was a day trip for some Melbournian visitors, regulars for the trout fishing but expanding their horizons to the pleasures of salt water fishing. Another good start to the day with good tarakihi , unlike Sunday they went hard for an hour or two , then that pretty well was that. Still, everyone was happy and as the weather started to deteriate we headed for home.