Last weekend about 6 kayak fishers from Canberra made a trek to Bateman's Bay to chase snapper and (hopefully) yellowtail kingfish offshore. I managed to catch a small slimy mackeral (see pic), and dreaming of big fish I hooked him through the nose and sent him out on my 10kg outfit as a live bait. I drifted along for about an hour, catching a few fish on soft plastics along the way (see pictures of a few of them, a snapper, an elegant wrasse and a pike). All of a sudden the rod which had the live mackeral on it started to bend like it had a dead weight on the end, then it started pumping - we all know what that means!

Since I was unlikely to hook the squid on the single hook I had in the mackeral, I slowly drew the squid to the surface, and removed the mackeral, replacing it with a squid jig. He took a little bit of convincing, but the squid eventually grabbed the jig and I landed him.

