THE forecast was for a 15-20 knot southeasterly wind and a 2-3m swell. As you can imagine I didn’t set the alarm and, being a Sunday morning, I rolled out of bed at the leisurely hour of 7.30am. As I was munching my cereal, I looked at the webcam site on my phone and, to my surprise, the bar was …

IT’S hard to know where to start… Last month I struggled to scratch up a couple of photos due to the lack of fish I had caught. This month however the situation has changed, with good fish coming from all of, the different fisheries. Offshore hasn’t been easy with swell on the Brunswick Bar, but when we’ve made it out …

HEAT, humidity, mozzies biting, cicadas singing – this spells the beginning of the mangrove jack and mud crab season to me. There’s a few mud crabs on the move now but they will only improve as summer progresses. They are in varying degrees of fullness at the moment, with some big rusty ones being caught and some green empty ones …

WITH travel restrictions easing more, the upcoming holiday season is looking good for fishers. If you are thinking of coming to the Byron coast, the fishing has been decent. After storms and substantial rain, the river is a great place to be with all the warm water species now in full swing. Hugh recently came down to the caravan park …

THE doldrums of winter are behind us, but spring brings its own difficulties. Northerly wind, offshore currents and clear river water make things challenging. For river anglers the answer is simple – that is to fish upstream. I know I bang on about it all the time, but it’s because I firmly believe your best bet is above Tumbulgum in …

BREAM are great fish to catch and are ideally suited for kids, due to their accessibility. Most wharves, pontoons, rock walls and riverbanks hold a population of bream. Most years around this time pictures of Keira and myself appear in these pages with bream from the bottom end of the Brunswick River. It’s something we particularly love, and this year …

IT’S nice to see the return of spotted mackerel to Brunswick Heads after they’ve been absent for a few years. These crazy little fish are as frustrating as ever but when they decide to bite, they can really turn it on. A lot of people I know around Brunswick Heads don’t like spotted mackerel as much as the larger spanish …

WELL the drought’s over on the Northern Rivers! Twenty-four inches of drought-breaking rain in four days will do that. All those fish that were above Mullumbimby in the Brunswick River aren’t there anymore. We really needed a good flush of the system like this to get things moving both in the river and offshore. Offshore was stagnant, with cold water …

Lewan and I were trying to skull drag our mackerel to the boat on many days and this often worked on the smaller fish but boy did we lose some. We pulled hooks, broke hooks, broke wire traces and broke the line in an effort to get the mackerel past the sharks. As annoying as it is not being able …

He assumed the spearfisher knew it was a big shark, and this is where things got a bit funny because the spearfisher thought he was fighting a marlin, but they never communicated this to each other. Anyway, you can imagine the result. Amid a barrage of profanities with the word shark thrown in a few times, the spearfisher came out …