Damien, Pierre and Gilles booked a 5 days fishing trip in Kirinda to target GTs on popper. They are experienced fishermen and have traveled to different fishing destinations, but they hadn’t had the opportunity to challenge a big GT on popper.

A few days before their arrival, I received a call from Damien, he wanted to know about the conditions and the fishing. At that time I didn’t really have good news to give him… The water was green like a veg soup and was making the fish very difficult to catch. But I told him I was confident for their trip, for sure conditions and fishing would not stay like this for long.

They arrived in Kirinda on the 20th and had a day off on the 21st to prepare their tackle and have a rest after their long travel from France. The 22nd was the first day of fishing & we started by trying popping on the reef. The water colour was much better, we saw some schools of bait on the surface, but there were no GT around. Then we decide to try our jigging spots. On the first spot we immediately found fish and they caught a couple of Goldspot trevally. Next drifts saw more Goldspot and some nice Gt’s being caught. After lunch we decide to try one of

our new jigging spots which is little bit deeper and where we have caught Amberjack before. The Garmin showed plenty of marks on the screen. One of the most incredible jigging action session I have ever seen in Kirinda started immediately after the guys dropped their jigs.  In 3 hours they caught 25 amberjack between 8 and 20 kg. It was just insane !! Sometimes they had double hook ups and on the last drift it was a triple hook up!!

The next day we tried jigging again at a different spot where we caught some nice doggies last season. The fish were there but the current was very strong and it was very difficult for the jig to touch the bottom. However, they caught some GTs, Goldspot trevally and Groupers. On the way back to harbour at the end of the day we stopped to do some popping and Gilles caught a nice « black » GT with an old school River2Sea Dumbell Pop 200.

Due to the strong current we concentrated our effort on popping for GTs, which were the target of the trip for our 3 Frenchmen. During the last 3 days we had most of the GT activity at the end of the day. Most of the fish caught on popper were GTs with an average of 10 kg. Pierre had the bite of the trip, a proper monster GT of Kirinda, who took Pierre’s Hammerhead E-cup, but that fish was running so fast in the structure of the drop off and broke the line… Thankfully, Pierre was using barbless treble hooks and the GT easily removed easily the lure from it’s mouth as 5 minutes later we saw the E-cup floating on surface scarred with big teeth marks. The best catch came from Gilles with a decent 25 kg GT caught on a Gunz sinking stickbait and his PE 4 combo. The last day they caught 16 GTs for a total of 34 bites, it was a nice day to finish their trip.

Damien, Pierre and Gilles enjoyed their trip, especially the first day with Amberjack and for sure Pierre will never forget the monster GT that broke his line. Personally, I enjoyed the trip & company of these 3 compatriots especially after the sad news of the terrorist attack in Paris.

Nico

 

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