BOI Fishing Report - August 6, 2026

Barbara with her personal best Kingfish!

First my apologies for missing reports during July, been a busy period looking after forestry planting crews! The trees are now in the ground and now its back to the Tackle shop, and some local fishing. Meanwhile I’m told the fishing in and around the Bay has been absolutely insane. I can’t remember being shown so many photos of XOS snapper caught off the Rocks. Almost everywhere seems to fishing well, and its easy as.. pick your weather window, deploy some berley and send out a big bait. My usual fishing buddy Pete was missing our fishing trips so took his light softbait combo for a walk around the rocks. He ended up with his personal best snapper! Had to jump into the water to grab it!
And the Kingfish are abundant with their average size way larger than I’ve experienced. Barbara was fishing with Terry up the Coast and ended up with an absolute stonker!
 
Last Tuesday we towed the 2050SC Stabicraft the 10 hours to Waihau Bay. We stopped at Trophy Lures and obtained some great intel from Floyd and then launched to try our hand at night time jigging. Nearing spot X, the A-scope flashed strongly so we stopped for a look and found dense bait with some promising blobs nearby. This was my first time on the rod and on my first drop of 5 colours I engaged the drag and found my line was slack??? I thought I’d been bitten off but quickly retrieved 20m and bam, I had a fish on pulling string!!! Forty minutes later we had a 60kg fish on the deck! Next up was Hayden who dropped his jig and was also immediately on. He made quick work of it and we had a slightly larger model in the boot! That was enough for us so we headed in to get some sleep.

The next day we headed out early but couldn’t locate the fish for a jig, so we decided to tow some lures after the sun came up. About 9.30am one of the outriggers went off although the bloody clip didn’t let go (overtight from a previous trip in rough seas! Note to SELF: Check everything!). Managed to clear the clip and the other rods and then a bit of work to put a 55kg model on the deck. The itch has now and truly been scratched so now back to the BOI to chase other species. Fingers crossed those big Pacific Bluefin show up again in the next few months.