AUSTRALIA - Brother's First Bull

I left Brisbane on Friday arvo and headed for the Gold Coast. The plan was to target a few small to medium sharks and see if I could collect some big bait for some future trips. Also a big goal was to get my brother onto his first decent shark.

Got to our spot about half an hour before the sun went down. Quickly tied on some traces and rigged up some baits, which consisted of a couple of catfish and a bonito. The channel we were fishing in is less than 200m across, so baits were spread out between 50-100m out. The sun was just disappearing over the horizon when the last bait was dropped. Couldn't complain about the conditions.

Knowing that high tide wasn't until 10pm and low wasn't until 4am, I was quietly confident that if the bite was slow we would see some action as it got closer to low tide later in the night. Turns out that it was a quiet night without a click of a drag up until around 11pm when the bonito was swapped out for a mullet and the catfish were left out due to their tough skin. After this we decided to roll out the sleeping bags and get some sleep.

At about 1:30am in the morning my brother’s rod with the mullet took off out of nowhere. Being a bit more used to this late night wake up than my brother is, I was at his rod and had it in free spool before he had even got out of his sleeping bag. I let him have the bait for another 10 seconds before cranking down and setting the hook home. I might mention that while this was happening less than 20m away a rather intoxicated bloke decided to for a swim. I then handed the rod over to my brother; it was now all up to him. After the hook set it continued on a run but was struggled under the grunt of the Fin-Nor Offshore. My brother did really well and within about 10-15 minutes and dodging one very drunk individual later we had a nice size bull in the shallows. By this time we had a small little crowd surrounding us marveling at what they were looking at. Aaaaaah the general public are funny sometimes .

The 14/0 circle was pinned perfectly in the corner of the jaw and after a quick attempt with the pliers, was swiftly cut with the bolt cutters.

My brother gets into position for a quick couple of photos. I snap a few pics in between the strangers hands coming in for a feel of the sharks tail.

After this my brother quickly got her back in the water and after a quick push she was off into deep water.
The rest of the night remained uneventful.

The following day we both headed out up river in the kayaks to see if we could get onto some small river bulls. After some rain and rather average conditions, sadly none were in the mood and we came home with nothing.

Sunday saw us attempting to catch some rather smart rays. We tried feeding them bait but they just didn't seem interested. I had forgotten my jagging rig and the one I fastened up out of some big J's and some thin rope just wasn't working. It is very frustrating have beautiful bait sized rays just sitting there within 5m and there's nothing you can do .

All in all, I may not have come home with any bait but I did manage to get my little brother on to his first decent bull. With a bit of practice he'll be helping me chase the big boys in mo time.