Shore Based Fun

The weekend saw generally crappy weather conditions prevent any real thoughts of going out on the boat. There was a typhoon to the North of us and we were getting periods of squally wind and rain.
There isn't many land based fishing options here in the islands. Land based fishing is illegal in Koror state (where I live) and to be honest it would be pretty pointless anyway as the area is totally fished out. On the main island there are a couple of old WW2 ports that you can fish from, so I decided to drive up there and test my luck.
I had just received an order of lures that I had placed with Cabellas a couple of weeks earlier and these land based areas give me a good chance to work out how the lure performs without the pressure of my fishing mates giving me shit or me wasting time at a good location. And there is also the possibility of getting some dinner too, which was high on my agenda.
So I hit my spot in windy and cloudy conditions with the threat of rain, no real problem, a little cloud cover usually provides better fishing anyway. As usual my target was Blue Finned Trevally, there is a school of them that comes into the port on high tide and I was eager to get amongst them. The problem with these fish is that they have seen thousands of lures so its takes a little bit of cunning to catch one.
My usual tactic is to fish with small poppers (50 - 70mm) and a light bass outfit (2-4lb rod, shimano Sienna 4000 with Varivas PE#2 line) and thin leader (12lb). I have caught a few fish with this gear but I have also lost a lot of lures thanks to the occasional stray barracuda, reef shark or the sharp rocks. This time I wanted to concentrate on spoons and topwater "walk the dog" style lures such as the Heddon Zara Super Spook, so I used a heavier outfit (6-15lb ugly stick, Shimano Baitrunner 8000D and 30lb Power Pro line) with 50lb leader. This outfit was certainly overkill but I wanted to make sure that all my gear came home with me.
The fishing was tough as usual with about 3 hours of casting accounting for 3 fish, one of which (pictured) I took home for dinner, a perfect pan sized 51cm Blue Finned Trevally, who took my new 100mm Stingray ("monkey puke" colour) spoon and put up an excellent fight. The other fish caught were a Long Tom/Needle Fish/Datsu/Alligator Gar of about 100cm (a crappy fish whatever you call them) on the same lure and a nice Mangrove Jack of about 35cm caught from among the seagrass on a 20g Kastmaster slug.
Fishing from the land up there reminds me a lot of fishing in Australia, you really have to work and plan what you are going to catch. It made nice change from the boat and I will probably do a little more of it in the future. Oh and as a bonus I found a lure that I had lost up there about 6 months earlier! What more could you want???