Fifteen year old Lisa Nola with her striped marlin

For most of the year, we are out on the harbour in splendid isolation, but over the summer we’ve been joined by a great flotilla of holiday makers, and from all accounts, there’s been plenty of fish to go around.

Holiday home-owners Brian and Sarah Wells got their snapper quota in fairly quick time off Batley last week, which shows the fish are well up in the harbour’s upper reaches.

Something interesting to emerge has been the successful use of soft baits, as opposed to the traditional squid and pillys, with some excellent catches and good sized fish seeming attracted to the artificial baits.

“They are getting surprisingly large fish,” said Mike Nola, of Nolas Sports in Dargaville.

In fact Mike had a great day out of the west coast with his daughter Lisa on board. “We started out about 10 kilometres off at the Pinnacle with soft baits landing trevally up to seven kilos,” Mike said.

“Then Lisa hooked up on a 139 kilo striped marlin and spent about 45 minutes getting it to the boat. But funnily enough, she had earlier also landed a 25 kilo kingfish, and she says that was a harder battle than the marlin.

Surfcasting on Ripiro Beach has also been a popular angling pastime although one local was ruefully regarding his tackle box after the ravages of school sharks.

“I lost a dozen hooks and traces with nothing to show for it,” the ruefull fisher told us.

“But the next day, and the day following, we managed to get a good feed of snapper, kahawai and trevally.”

So the Kaipara is proving to be a bountiful harbour, whatever the bait.

Cheers, Gravy.