COOMERA FLUSH BRINGS ON THE BITE
HI everyone, hope you’ve all had a great week and enjoyed the Easter holidays. After a wet and windy Easter it’s nice to finally see the wind ease and the sunshine return to the Gold Coast. The forecast is looking much better for the next week to head outdoors and go fishing. Let’s see what’s been happening this week.
Due to weather conditions, fishing sheltered waterways has been the best bet for getting among some fishing action on the Gold Coast and Tweed lately. The top end of the Coomera has had another flush out with plenty of freshwater moving down the river. Fishing has been good in the Coomera with the Maxwell family (see pictures in Brag Board) finding a good mixture of mangrove jack, moses perch and flathead at the junction of the North and South Arms using WA pilchards for bait. The water temp is still high enough to be holding mangrove jack, estuary cod and trevally. Fishing rock walls around Sanctuary Cove and Hope Island with live baits like herring, garfish, silver biddies and mullet has produced some top quality estuary cod.
Some good-sized flathead have been caught during the past week. Targeting deeper holes in the Tweed River, Nerang River, Pimpama River, Coomera River and Logan River has produced some good quality fish. Flathead are a great target species for landbased fishos – find a nice stretch of bank with a few weed beds and a bit of a dropoff and cast and retrieve a soft plastic or diving hard body lure. Live yabbies, bait fish or frozen baits like white pilchards will work well, just have a cast and let your bait drift along with the tide, if you have no luck just move up the bank a bit and repeat the process. Once you find a flathead hopefully there should be a few holding up in that area.
Smithy from Brad Smith Fishing Charters reports the mid to upper reaches of the Tweed River is the place to be as most fish seem to migrate upstream as the weather gets cooler. There are some good schools of medium-sized flathead taking the lures in the shallow areas of the river and schools of small trevally busting up around the bridges on the tide changes. The bait should start schooling up in the deeper holes in the river.
Clint reports a week of mixed weather but the fish were biting well most of the time. Some great tusk fish have been coming through – we’ve caught more than 40 this week on our Broadwater Charters. Also big schools of winter whiting have been prominent, and are very aggressive lure takers and a lot of fun on light tackle. And some dinner plate size flounder, squid, small snapper, tarwhine and grassy emperor. Some great areas to fish with the lures are the keyhole opposite SeaWorld, along Labrador, both sides of Carters Bank, the edges of the channel both sides of Crab island, the reef and weed beds at Currigee.
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.