Australian YouTuber Sammy Hitzke spent almost four hours grinding for what should have been a quick deep-drop limit on what he calls his favourite eating fish — the flame tail or queen snapper — in an episode that became a study in pushing through bad conditions.
"To catch them, I need to head 60 kilometres offshore," Hitzke told viewers at the start of the video. "It's a damn long way, but I tell you what — it'll all be worth it if we can find some delicious red fish."
The forecast didn't quite play ball. With strong wind and a short, sharp swell pushing the boat around, even the SeaKeeper-equipped rig was struggling to settle. "There's a bit more breeze out the back here, which is fine. It's not unmanageable. It's a short, sharp rock and roll," he said.
The plan was to high-speed troll on the run-out, drop a deep-drop spread on hex-heads, then switch to deep-drop bait rigs for the flame tail. Hitzke ran two big hex-head lures at around 22 km/h on bent-butt outfits with 37 kg line, hoping for a wahoo or marlin to break the morning open.
It didn't happen. "No hits on the lures, which is a bit of a shame. I would have liked a cheeky wahoo to kick us off."
Once on the mark, the fishing got serious. Solo operations meant six-hook deep-drop rigs on Mustad 12/0s, fished on a Wilson Assist P5-10 rod paired with one of Wilson's 10-amp lithium batteries strapped directly to the rod. Hitzke is bullish on the strap-on lithium setup over older Anderson-plug systems.
"You don't have to plug them into Anderson plugs or anything like that that always seem to corrode out," he said. "You can just lift up your whole outfit. Mobile, agile, and hostile."
The first drops produced a steady run of ornate cod — useful eating but not the target. After several drifts, the first flame tail finally surfaced.
"It's been very, very hard going. Little bit of head nod there. I can see some color. Yes, that's a red one. Only attacker, but it's a ready nonetheless."
By his fifth flame tail he was running out of patience. "We worked very hard for these fish today. I didn't want to chew early, that's for sure. Been at them for almost three or four hours, and yeah, finally got our bag, but that's all right. We got there in the end."
After bagging out, he tried to drop down to 200 metres for kingfish or a bar cod jig, but the current made it pointless. "Pretty well impossible to jig with anything less than a house brick. It's almost three o'clock now, so I can potentially chuck the lures out for blue marlin, but as we know, those things take time. I do have to travel about 55 ks home as well."
A token small mac tuna session on the way back rounded out the day before he conceded he wouldn't be filming the promised catch-and-cook segment in this episode.
"I know we have a channel built on trust, and I spent a long time talking up a catch and cook this week," he told viewers. "I lied to you. I did not do one. Ran out of time."
He also asked his audience for help with a flame tail biology question that has divided commenters: out of his five fish, only one had a noticeably long tail. "Big flame tail — well, not physically big, but long tail versus short tail. I've got one long tail and all the rest are short. Are we dealing with a male versus female sort of thing? Or what influences tail length? If you guys know, let me know in the comments."