Opportunity, Hard Work and Timing

By Dan Trotter on June 28, 2016 in Other

There’s no doubt about it, pretty much everything we do in life requires three key ingredients: opportunity, a hell of a lot of hard work, and the right timing. Whether we look at love and relationships, career and prosperity, knowledge and wisdom, or even fishing, these key ingredients are essential. There is, of course, a good measure of luck involved much of the time too, but some people just refuse to admit it.

Hopefully we all know by now that life’s one amazing a journey through the best of times and the toughest of times; soaring highs where your wings risk being burnt by the sun and the darkest of days when it feels like you couldn’t give a flying f**k if the sun never shone again. It’s hard work, we all have to do it, so look for the opportunities and strike when the timing is right.

June is an awesome month for fishing on our fair shores. Sure, the warmth of summer is gone and the days are short, but the fish don’t care. They just change their habits or swim somewhere else. Finding out where they go and learning their behaviours is what makes fishing so consistently challenging, enthralling and rewarding.

This month, start at your feet where the waves lap the shore, learn to watch the water move and flow and study how this affects the conditions for the fish you want to catch. Too much wash and water movement and the squid move away from the rocks, not enough wash and the blackfish, bream and drummer become shy, spooky and are hard to get to bite. No current and the tailor, salmon and whiting will keep on the move instead of holding and waiting for a feed to come to them. Knowing when and where to cast, and with what bait, is part of the reward that hard work and experience delivers. Alternatively, you can just hire a good guide, which is what I’ll be doing next week. I want to learn how to catch jewfish on lures, so hopefully next issue I’ll have a photo and few stories to share.

Further afield where only boats dare go, the fishing in June can be epic. There are snapper to catch, big kings in deep water, even bigger tuna riding the cobalt currents, and gemfish, blue-eye trevalla and occasional hapuka living ferocious lives in the deeper dark oceans. If a relatively quick dusk or dawn session is all you have time for, get specific, know where you’re going and have a crack at snapper in the shallows or kings on the 100-metre hard reefs.

If you have a whole day on your hands and a boat capable of making the run, go wide, fish for deep water ooglies first, and keenly listen to the radio for reports of gold and blue barrels on the chew. Then, as the day draws on, change tactics, set a spread of lures and be ready to start a cube trail in search of tasty tuna.

There’s nothing like taking the opportunity when the timing is right and enjoying the rewards of hard work. That’s what life and fishing is all about – go get it!