KEY POINTS:
The continuing easterly wind pattern that has kept east coast boaties at home many days this summer has provided a bonanza for west coast anglers.
This has been the best gamefishing season most west coast fishers can remember, with football-field sized schools of skipjack boiling the surface.
The most unusual thing has been the number of the tropical mahimahi caught. The last time one was caught off New Plymouth was 1987 - this summer there have been many.
Marlin are still being caught every day. One productive area has been directly off the Manukau bar south channel at the 100m mark.
Snapper are prolific too, from 35m out, most in the 3-9kg range. Unusually juvenile snapper are being caught off the beaches north of the Manukau, from Muriwai right up to North Cape. This area is usually home only to fish of 35cm and up.
"I've never ever seen small fish taken off Muriwai Beach until this year," said kite expert Paul Barnes. "This year everyone is getting them, sometimes 10 at a time."
Rather than a sign of decreasing fish size, Barnes sees it as indication of a great "year class" recruitment from three or four years ago - there are so many fish in the harbours that the overflow of juveniles that would normally feed there is instead hitting the west coast beaches.
The west coast snapper fishery SNA8 has been commercially overfished for many years and was believed to be down to somewhere between 13 and 20 per cent of virgin biomass so any rebuild would be beneficial.
Barnes said the best fish were about 1km out, anglers taking bag limits of snapper from 4-9kg. At dawn and dusk they can be much closer. When the surf has been small, boaties fishing just behind the break in as little as 10m have been cleaning up with soft baits.
Best baits on the kites right now are fresh mullet or kahawai, Barnes said.
There are also plenty of dogfish being caught off the west coast, good eating provided you cut the tail immediately to release ammonia.
Barnes warns that larger sharks are out in numbers too, more plentiful further north of Muriwai. He advises those employing submarines to tow lines out to use small baits and retrieve their set quickly.
While some people advocate use of soft baits on long-lines, Barnes rubbishes it.
A test by one of his customers over time, where 600 hooks were set with soft baits and another 600 set with regular bait, produced results "around 50 to one" in favour of the real thing.
"The only time they work well is using the crabs to target gurnard, and then they only seem to catch on the way out," he said.
Some fishers believe soft baits work well on the last hook at each end of the line, where there will be some rise and movement due to the movement of the buoy. But Barnes asks: "Why would you put a soft bait on your two best hooks?"
After years of commercial fishing and kite longline development he favours live baits on those two hooks.
"A jack mackerel there will pretty well guarantee a big snapper, a john dory or even a kingfish."
In his experience, the biggest fish take the baits nearest the anchor or weights.
"If you put a weight in the middle of the line you'll get bigger fish on the two hooks on either side of it. I have no idea why but it's been demonstrated to me absolutely beyond doubt."
Sometimes, he'll put a weight three or four clips up the backbone, so the last three or four hooks rise up from the bottom. They must be the down-current ones to avoid tangling the rest of the line.
"It acts like a ledger rig and sometimes that's where you'll get your best fish of the day."
The water was 21.5C off the Manukau this week when Huia fishing identity Peter Jackson caught two marlin. He rates this summer as the best ever.
"The fish are in big numbers but in isolated patches [between the 80m and 100m mark], you just have to find them. We've seen a school of at least 200 mahimahi."
He stirs them up by cubing fresh skipjack, then flicks soft baits at them, a method he learned in the Pacific Islands.
Hot fishing also continues off the east coast with great kahawai and kingfish action as well as the snapper on the bottom.
