Moutohora to Motiti

Sorry, not many photos today...

Typical Tuesday, with Vela focused on her work for most of the day. Meanwhile, Nathan spent most of his day fishing and otherwise trying to keep out of Vela's way. On his first cast in the morning, Nathan pulled in a (very) small kingfish. Fortunately it self released onto the duck board and quickly hopped into the water and swam off.

A whole school of these baby kingfish were underneath the boat now, and there were some larger shapes moving down there as well. Nathan quickly dropped his line in again, but no more bites. Looking more closely at the larger shapes, it became apparent they were not larger kingfish, but instead bronze whaler sharks following the small kingfish. This distracted Nathan for a while watching the sharks circle the boat. The sharks hung around for nearly an hour, doing lazy circles, at least three of them. Unfortunately we only thought to grab the 360 camera for some footage after watching them for a long while, and only got footage of the one shark as it was moving away.

About 2pm, it was time to move spots, heading 30 miles across the bay to Motiti Island. Along the way we saw a school of kahawai working the surface, so we dragged a lure and quickly pulled a nice fish on board. A little sick of eating kahawai, and no ability to smoke it on board, we opted to use this for bait and try to snag something different later on.

About 4 hours later we pulled into the south west corner of Motiti and put the pick down. Nathan was straight back into the fishing, armed with his fresh kahawai bait. There were plenty of snapper here, and even though a couple were probably legal, they weren't worth keeping (our motto is if you have to measure it, it's not worth keeping). Nathan also hooked a small trevally, again not big enough to keep. We also noticed lots of long blue fish following our baits, thinking these were koheru, Nathan tried to snag one. It took a bit of trying as these fish fight hard for their size and have soft mouths, but we managed to catch two nice fat specimens.

Often koheru are used as bait for kingfish, but they are also delicious sashimi, so these two will become lunch tomorrow! Koheru are a very cool fish, it's a little hard to tell when they're out of the water, easy to see if you're spearfishing, but their top side glows a bright yellow if there is a predator nearby!

As the sun set, the fish went off the bite. So we marveled at how the colours of the rainbow are reflected in the sunset when there aren't any clouds, and then turned in for the evening.Baca lagi