A SWELL TIME FOR MACKEREL
HI everyone, hope you’ve all had a great week. We were finally blessed with some nice weather last weekend with light winds, plenty of sunshine and a decrease in swell giving anglers plenty of options on the Gold Coast. Let’s have a look at what’s been biting.
It was great to finally see a long overdue break in the weather for anglers keen to get offshore and chase pelagic species.
The strong SE winds and swell of the past couple of weeks did the job and pushed in some quality warm water into the 18 to 24 fathom line and, combined with stirring the bait up, has seen some fantastic Spanish mackerel being caught by lucky anglers.
Good quality fish have been responding well to trolling a mixture of diving lures at first light rigged on a short piece of single strand wire. Once the bite slows down, switching to slow trolled live yakkas on a twin hook stinger rig has done the job well.
Keep your eye on the sounder for bait schools, if the fish are deep just slow down to near a complete stop and let the baits sink enough for them to respond. A down rigger is a great option to run a bait deep to cover more area.
Coomera Bait and Tackle customer John Hutchesson had a great day fishing off the Tweed last weekend landing a 1.5m 20+ kg wahoo (see photo) which took a hard body diving lure. The fish put in some blistering runs before John got the upper hand landing his awesome catch. Hopefully we will see some great pelagic action during the next couple of months.
Coomera Houseboat Holidays customers have scored a feed of bream flathead and whiting from the sandbanks and channels around Wavebreak Island, Crab Island, Coomera River, The Never Fails, Curtis Anchorage, North Bedrooms, Tiger Mullet Channel, Jacobs Well around the shoals, Logan River and Canaipa Passage. Yabbies are great all-round bait, the kids will have fun pumping them. I’d also recommend worms, prawns, white pilchards and mullet fillet to catch a feed.
On the Tweed River Brad from Brad Smith Fishing reports trevally are still marauding the bait schools around the tide changes particularly on the last of the run-out and first of the run-in tides.
Flathead are holding in the deeper holes where the water is cooler on the bottom and the bream and whiting are still taking surface poppers over the shallow flats. Mangrove jacks are favouring the very early morning and late afternoon tide changes through the middle reaches.
Clint has returned from a break and some boat maintenance and found his customers a good variety of fish this week. The southern Broadwater has produced whiting around the 30cm mark, winter whiting, flounder and flathead. The Gold Coast Seaway is producing a mixed bag including Maori cod, flathead and snapper
Good luck to everyone fishing in the Pirtek Fishing Challenge on Sunday. I will be out on the water with my daughters chasing whiting in this year’s event, hopefully we can catch and release a few big ones.
Hope you all have a good weekend and get out for a fish, if you have any great catches or photos you would like to share, please email us and let us know how you went.