Keen Exmouth angler scores swordfish success

Last week we mentioned that we couldn’t wait for Joey Atzeni to bring up a broadie with his fishing.

Joey is a young enthusiastic angler who moved to Exmouth earlier this year with his partner.

He went out on Friday and on his first drop for a broadie caught a pending WA record of a 48.5kg swordfish on 24kg line.

To say he is pleased is an understatement, although I think we are more stoked than him!

Joey has been working as a deckhand on the charter vessel Innkeeper, but on this day he took out his own boat with Brendon Hawker.

Joey had done a lot of reading and research for broadies and it all paid off on the very first drop.

Congratulations Joey, awesome effort.

Customers instore say the gulf is absolutely firing with schools of bait being smashed up by mack tuna, long-tail tuna, mackerel and sharks.

The predatory fish are all feeding on small minnows.

The fishos tried all sorts of lures that may have been too large and they are heading out again to try some small metals and stick baits.

Meanwhile, another customer did well drifting the shoals using the Sanmar baits and cleaned up on blue-line emperor, cod and other tasty reef species.

King Reef, the artificial reef that was installed last year is holding some great bait of late and anglers not sure of the coordinates can find them easily on the Recfishwest website.

Recfishwest also has a handy app for species identification.

The billfishing scene has not slowed with newcomer to town Paul Bourne catching his first sailfish and the crew seeing another four marlin for the day.

The weed has been a little challenging for anyone trolling lures.

One customer reported a triple tail on some weed not far from Nor West Reef.

Others have said dolphinfish have been thick around the west side and are happy to take on just about anything presented to them.

This is especially the case when they are in big schools, because they get quite competitive.

Sometimes they can go quiet after a few have been caught but you really don’t need many as they are best eaten fresh, not frozen.

Squid have been showing up in good numbers on both the west side and gulf side.

If you are fishing from a boat or the shore, we always recommend having at least two squid jigs in your tackle box because you can’t really catch them on much else.

Colours catch the angler more than the squid at times but certain people do have preferences and it pays to have a few options