Bush 'n Beach Fishing Magazine Location reports & tips for fishing, boating, camping, kayaking, 4WDing in Queensland and Northern NSW
Wow, I can’t believe Christmas is just around the corner – it has snuck up fairly fast and another year is nearly over.
As we know, the weather this year has been a major factor, with plenty of rain and a lot of wind, getting out on the water fishing was made a little more difficult than normal.
Though I have to say, when we were able to get out, the fishing on average this year was quite good.
Unfortunately, this article won’t be very big this month, with a few back issues and the weather, I’ve been able to get only one charter out since my previous article. Though this particular trip was a bit special.
I picked Simon – one of my regular clients – up from the boat ramp at a leisurely 7.30am and we headed out to try getting ourselves a few squire on soft plastics.
This was our first plan, then we were going to chase flathead at about 11am on the low tide and finish the charter at about 2pm and head home.
So, we headed to Potts Point where I found a few fish on the sounder.
We made a few drifts through that area with soft plastics, unfortunately only picking up a few under-sized grass sweetlip and nothing else.
We anchored up on a few good shows of fish and cast soft plastics at them for a while, but we caught absolutely nothing.
So, we decided to go and chase a few flathead, as it was getting towards the low tide.
We arrived at our first area, where we tied on a couple of Zerek Bulldog Cranks and made a few passes along the bank trolling our little hard-bodies.
Plenty of bait was around but still not much was happening after a couple of passes along the bank.
I eventually got a hit from a nice fish, but I mustn’t have pinned it too well with the hooks and it got away.
We made a few more passes along the same area where we’d had a few hits, but we just couldn’t hook up, so we made the call to pull up to a little spot and cast a few soft plastics.
However, the same thing happened there for about an hour – we were getting bumps and taps on our lures, but we still couldn’t get the hooks to set on any fish, so we decided to move. We moved around about 500m or so to a nice drain and started putting a few casts in.
On about my fourth cast, whack – I hooked onto a nice fish and, before we knew it, a decent 50cm flathead was in the boat.
Thank the fishing gods for that!
It was quite a tough morning – we were right on the bottom of the tide by that stage, with the first fish landed for the day.
We kept on casting and then the same thing happened – we got a couple of bumps and a few taps but still not much was happening.
So, we changed the lures and put a couple of paddle tails on to see if the extra vibration might stir these fish up.
This worked instantly, with us catching a couple of smaller flathead.
