Page 44 - BNB Fishing mag

Family fun at fabulous Fraser Island
While the tailor were sparse, they had been around in May and June and will no doubt be back by the time this goes to print, with more schools around the Gold Coast at the time of writing.
Beach fishing at Fraser Island in winter and early spring tends to be productive for tailor, whiting, bream, tarwhine and dart, with specialist catches of mulloway, sharks and spanish mackerel avail- able for those who tar- get them.
Relaxing by the resort pool is a great option between shing sessions with the family.
Look for at sand spits with only a thin lm of water over them for beach worming at low tide.
Page 44 – Bush ’n Beach Fishing, August 2020
* from P43 self-contained cooking facilities as well.
cess sand and salt spray from your vehicle. Fishing choices
whiting, I strongly rec- ommend live beach worms.
Western Fraser flats
Other benefits include wide four-wheel-drive parking spaces and an awesome coin-operated carwash to remove ex-
During our recent trip, the beach fishing for whiting was the best it had been in several years.
Pipis will pick up a few fish and quality red-dyed frozen worms will also catch the odd one.
The western side of the island offers a great option for a bit of vari- ety and protection from strong southeasterly wind.
You can check the wind and ocean conditions while taking in the views from your balcony at Eu- rong Beach Resort.
For those chasing
For those who don’t mind dart, fishing the deeper water gutters on high or low tide will pick them up most times of the day.
The beach
The best locations for whiting are the shal- low low tide gutters with a blind or closed end where the fish will gather to feed on worms and pipis.
The full and new moons are ideal for fishing the western side because these generate bigger tides, meaning higher highs and lower lows.
Be sure to stand well away from the water when casting or you will spook the fish.
The lower low tides (of 0.5m or less) will con- centrate flathead around the entrances of drains and creeks and will al- so draw whiting to the melon holes and shallow drains/channels that run along the flats.
If keen on bream and tarwhine, look for gut- ters around the rocks of Poyungan, Happy Valley and Ngkala, or fish just inside the back sandbank of middling to deep gutters.
I see some anglers making a couple of common mistakes on the western side.
For tailor, you want to be looking at gutters close to shore with a back bank within cast- ing range.
Soft plastics also work very well here but on very light finesse jig heads (1/6-1/8oz in the shallow water).
South and north entry points are ideal.
Don’t use extra-heavy jig heads meant for snapper because they sink like a stone.
Sometimes the beach has just one long channel running for kilometres parallel to shore.
Flathead, bream, trevally, grunter and even cod are realistic targets on the flats in the low-low tides of 0.2-0.4m.
First, do not use un- natural baits for the area (such as pipis and squid), rather, use live yabbies and beach worms.
In this case look for areas of variance, such as the back sandbank dipping in closer to shore or a steep drop in the sand from the beach into deeper water.
For the bait anglers, fishing the drains as the tide moves in or out can be effective, as can tar- geting melon holes and right up on the edge of the mangrove line near high tide.
An entry or exit point is also ideal.
Mulloway like deep holes, which are also signalled by steep drop- offs on the beach and will hang around ar- eas where bait congre- gates, such as patches of rock and reef along the beach.
That’s it for another month.
As always, I hope you jump on and say hi via my Ontour Fish- ing Australia Facebook page.
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