Fishing report

Plenty took advantage of the opportunities late in the week and those lucky enough to be able to get out caught plenty.

The whiting reports were excellent and some of the best for the season for fish size and bag size. 

Plenty of whiting over 40cm was reported and several nudging the 49cm mark.

The reports followed a definite pattern with early week, in the mornings especially, much better below the bridge while above the bridge (Dickies Bay, Reef Island) was difficult. Then we had a day or so of no fishing and the pattern switched around with above the bridge the place to be.

While pippies were good there were a lot of reports this week from those using pilchard fillets and fresh calamari strips.

Snapper continued and the best part about the reports this season is the variety of sizes.

Reports are coming from most of the places you would expect to find snapper, with reports slowly increasing across the corals.

The reports ranged from well undersize to just under 8kg and everything in between.

The bigger snapper was hitting hard and there wasn’t much problem hooking them, whereas the smaller fish were just picking and you needed to change to octopus hooks to catch them.

Baits varied this week with pilchards, squid, salmon, tuna, couta, yakkas octopus heads and saurys all working.

Calamari being caught are quality and sizes we haven’t seen before in such big numbers, but for some reason we aren’t seeing too many small ones.

The calamari reports now are more consistent and we are seeing some better numbers.

The best spots this week were Cleeland Bight for the boats, with a few from off Cowes. The land-based customers are telling us that the beaches in Cleeland Bight and off Ventnor have been better than the jetties, especially in the evenings, baited or artificial jigs didn’t make a lot of difference.

If you are launching at Newhaven, take your time on your way to the corals and drop a lure or two in while traveling up the channel because there has been plenty of salmon, couta and pike which will all be good fresh bait for your day on the snapper.

We’d like to say thank you to all of our customers for their support over the last few months, which has helped us to get to where we are with the door still open.

We are going to run a whiting competition over the Cup long weekend. The competition will run from 6am Saturday morning until 5pm Tuesday afternoon and is extremely easy to join.

There is one prize, anybody can enter, and it will simply be for the heaviest King George Whiting we weigh in over the Cup weekend.

There is no entry fee, no entry form, you can fish from the land or a boat/kayak. You don’t even need to be a regular customer.

Simply bring in your whiting into the shop to weigh. Each person can weigh one whiting each day.

The prize is a Shimano rod/reel combo with tackle valued at over $200 so well worth the effort of bringing in your best whiting.

You might think it isn’t worth weighing, but if no one else weighs one bigger you could miss out.

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