HAVE you ever hooked a silver trevally while fishing for bream or flatties in your local estuary? They go hard, don’t they? Even a “little” trevor under a kilogram possesses some serious pulling power and I’d wager they’d drag a similar sized bream backwards!
Well, imagine a silver trevally nudging 10kg and measuring about a metre!
There’s a place not far from here where silvers of those proportions are relatively commonplace; a fishing paradise known as Lord Howe Island.
I’ve just spent a few days fishing Lord Howe and, like most visitors to the island, I was blown away by the fishing on offer.
But it was the island’s silver trevally fishery that left me truly gob-smacked. It didn’t matter whether we were out wide or in the lagoon, these fish provided incredible sport on all forms of tackle – and every single one pulled like a freight train.
Lord Howe is famous for its silvers. In fact, the Australian record was taken from the lagoon in 1983 and tipped the scales at exactly 10kg. That’s one serious slab of silver!
Ben’s dad, Jim with a solid Lord Howe silver trevally of 6-7kgs.
We boated fish to 8kg, with the largest plucked from schools of kings in about 80 metres of water. It provided the perfect opportunity to compare the fighting qualities of kings versus trevally and, to be brutally honest, I’d rate the trevors a tougher adversary pound for pound!
The lagoon was alive with slightly smaller models, but they were incredibly challenging on 5-8kg spin sticks in shallow water. One of my favourite rods snapped like a twig as I tried to put the brakes on a rampaging fish in about six metres of water. It was brutal.
Stay tuned for a detailed feature on Lord Howe Island’s silver trevally down the track.
Ben fished Lord Howe Island Courtesy of Qantas and Ocean View Apartments.
