Bush 'n Beach Fishing Magazine Location reports & tips for fishing, boating, camping, kayaking, 4WDing in Queensland and Northern NSW
September signals the start of spring and it also opens up a few more options for anglers in southeast Queensland.
Winter was excellent for a range of species, particularly flathead, bream and tailor.
I don’t know how long it’s been since this amount of quality tailor and bream have been found in our bays and estuaries.
The flathead season has also been excellent.
Huge numbers of quality fish were feeding on the masses of bait that invaded Bramble and Deception bays during June and July.
The bait thinned out in August and the fish pushed up the rivers and creeks running off these bays.
Snot weed started turning up in these areas at the same time, so that might have had something to do with the bait disappearing.
The water will start to warm up a little this month and this will start to fire the local mangrove jack up from their winter slumber.
They’re still about to catch all year round, but the warmer months see a lot more action.
I’ve found September to be one of the better times of year for big numbers of mangrove jack, though the size has never been great.
A lot of these fish haven’t seen many lures for a while, so they’re generally very aggressive.
The Noosa River is an excellent option for chasing a few jacks during this period.
I’ve had some really good sessions there at this time of year.
It’s a bit of an overlapping month, so there are still plenty of trevally and jewfish feeding in the upper reaches during September.
It makes for some fairly exciting fishing when you come across a school of bait.
You don’t know what you’re going to hook next, especially when getting your lure to the bottom.
Trevally and tailor will often feed closer to the surface and the jewies, jacks and estuary cod will be found closer to the bottom.
The local rivers around Brisbane will also produce a few mangrove jack.
We don’t get the numbers around here that the Sunshine and Gold coasts get, though they are still worth chasing.
The quality of fish is generally very good, with plenty of beasts over 50cm and even some proper over 60cm brutes turn up each season.
Sunken timber and rock bars will hold most of the fish and they are easily located with a quality sounder.
Barramundi are also increasing in numbers and they are spread throughout all of the Brisbane rivers and creeks now.
They can be found in decent schools with a good sounder but getting them to bite can be a problem.
They seem to be fussier around Brisbane than anywhere else I’ve chased them.
The flathead season down around Jumpinpin Channel and Gold Coast Broadwater really fires up during September.
A lot of the bigger fish move towards the deeper ledges close to the mouth of Jumpinpin and the Gold Coast Seaway at this time of year.
Plenty of school-size fish and the occasional crocodile can still be found on the flats as well.
The options are endless in this area, so it’s worth carrying a good variety of lures to target water depths between 0.3-15m deep.
I don’t do much bream fishing these days, however during July I did sneak down to Jumpinpin to see how the bream schools were going.
I took my son Luke for his first proper session chasing bream and we caught a stack of fish.
Most of them were around the 30cm mark, with a few up around 35cm.
They’re good fun to catch on the right gear and the by-catch can be very good when using small plastics in deep water.
We landed flathead, tailor, trevally and a few school jewies when targeting the bream with small prawn imitations.
This month will see the bream schools thin out a little and the fish will have lost condition after finishing their spawning run.
The local rivers will be worth a look upstream for jew and threadfin salmon.
This month has always produced a few threadies for me locally and I’ll definitely be out there looking for a few big fork tails showing up on the sounder.
September is a great month to be on the water in southeast Queensland and we should be able to leave the warm clothes at home towards the end of the month.
Hope to see you on the water.
