Brisbane Deep Dropping Monsters – Blue Eye, Bass Grouper, Bar Cod and Pearl Perch

Sometimes I love nothing more than spending some time fishing off my local Brisbane fishing grounds particularly when it comes to deep dropping. Normally it’s just a day trip but on this occasion I decided we would put in 2 full days over a weekend to make the most of it. On the first day I concentrated in searching for ground between 300 and 450mtrs of water. It was a slow start to the day with only some eastern nannygai and splendid sea perch coming over the side.

After searching for most of the day I found some ground in 330mtrs with a nice show on the furuno 295 and had a drop. It wasn’t long before the rods were bent over with quality fish and first up was an ocean blue eye trevalla which is very similar to the normal blue eye but has a slightly different head. We soon followed up with some beautiful bass grouper with one a dead set horse.

With the arvo getting on we headed back in close and had a quick drop in 120mtrs and got a couple of pearlies and small bar cod before heading back in the bay for sleep out of the wind.

Sunday we went and fished the 100 to 120mtr line and after hours and hours of sounding we caught some great pearl perch and small bar cod. I dropped down one of the new mustad ink vader octopus lures that i was given a sample to try. It wasn’t long before my venom pe2-8 rod was buckled over and 80lb line peeled from my reel. After some massive runs i was getting low on line and we had to back the boat up to get some line back as we were caught up in a bit of current. After an epic battle i had it coming and to my surprise a massive bar cod hit the surface. It was a mission to get it in the boat and even harder to hold the monster up for some photos. Ideally I would have liked to let it go but pulling a fish from 120mtrs means certain mortality and bar cod even at that size can still eat pretty well.

The new mustad ink vader octopus did a great job handling a fish like that and i have no doubt they will rack up a big range of species

click the link to watch a video of the big bar cod being caught – https://youtu.be/orKbUazqRes