josamill

Great work Charles! A memorable beach session........I chuckled when you wrote that the salmon fillet didn't work as bait! Poor old salmon doesn't get a good rap from humans or fish... (FYI - excuse the teacher coming out - plural of salmon is salmon, and plural of tailor is tailor - not salmons and tailors)

Very nice! You would've been very excited!!

Some good action there! A friend of my sons, (who is 10 years old!!) has caught 3 x bronze whalers between 4 foot & 5.5 foot in the past 8 months - all half way between Sandy Point and the Basin. His dad showed me the photos and these guys could be the offenders. That said, we had some 80cm kingies under our boat in Careel Bay yesterday afternoon - so who knows...

Hi Grug.......off Palm Beach Golf Course, Mackerel Beach.....anywhere with ribbon weed. As always, patience. I've had most luck on full tides - middle of the day is fine too. Seem to catch arrow squid over the kelp beds around Barrenjoey and West Head, and Southern Calamari in Pittwater in ribbon weed. My son got another solid one on Saturday.

Tempted to down rig these guys, but decided to have a calamari feast instead this time. All caught in the middle of the day, in 6 feet of water, and within 30 minutes - wish it was always that easy. Heads and legs are vacuum sealed and snap frozen hopefully to be inhaled by something large and silver on Saturday!

Nice work! Great fun fishing those light, small plastics in 15-30 feet.

Classic - caught more than a few flounder over 40 years, but never a sole. Didn't even know they lived in NSW. Used to be a treat at restaurants in the 1970s - washed down with a Blue Nun!

Upping the hook size will save lives! It won't stop them pilfering your bait though!

Yes - also squid chomp them. Sadly you end up killing half of them with the hook - even long shanks if they swallow the bait too far.

Happens every year - should make Winter snapper fishermen very happy to know the next generation are up and running. Up until 2 weeks ago, a live nipper cast in our favourite Pittwater haunts meant quality yellowfin bream and some thumping whiting to 44cm. Like a switch turning on, hoards of baby reds turned up this week - real babies - and they smash baits before anything else has a chance. From Scotland Island, to Saltpan, Snappermans to Mackeral - they are there like flies in Summer and will remain, as they always do, until October/November. Time to venture off shore.

Great report!

Great work mate! Run out tide I think? Were you fishing at the western end of the beach where the creek comes out? We caught some stonking bream on yakka fillets there the previous weekend.

I was at Tuross in December for the Coila Lake run. Unbelievable fun .....jagging 5 or more prawns in each scoop. We had daggy old torches, 2 scoop nets and my 10 year old son and I got 2KGs every night in less than 45 mins. To Gordon's point, there were guys with drag nets filling multiple full size garbage bins with prawns. No sour grapes because we got all we could use, but not sure why these recreational guys needed to take commercial quantities. Last time Coila prawned like that was 1974 and I was the 10 year old.

Hi - never fished for flatties offshore - pretty much just in and around Broken Bay with poddy mullet and plastics. Wondering if somebody who knows could give me some direction. - Other than reefs, I've always imagined the bottom of the ocean around Sydney to be a big sandy desert - so how do you know where to find flathead? - Is there a better time of year for offshore flathead, or does it correspond with the better estuary months Oct-April? - What is the best rig & bait - understanding they are probably not overly fussy. - Drift? Any advice is appreciated!!

Legal size for tarwine 20cm I think? Not sure why not same as bream. Great flatties!

Cracking feed!

Well done! We were on the South Coast in January and flathead were unusually quiet while bream and whiting abounded.

Saturday afternoon - evening gave my son and a friend and I the best beach fishing session I can remember. 36 legal fish between 3 of us in 2 hours. The venue was the NSW south coast around Narooma. Rising tide, dropping wind, good gutter, low-medium swell, and - of course - beach worms. We took these bream and whiting home for the fry pan - filleted, boned, skinned and crumbed. Salmon for potato fish cakes. The whiting my son is holding went 45cm - 3cm bigger than our previous best.

Bad, bad people with no sense of right and wrong. Hitting you was an accident, but leaving the scene shows they don't have much to look forward to in their cowardly little lives. Main thing is you are OK - what a shocker!!

My son's 9 year old buddy caught a 5 foot bronze whaler a few hundred metres from that spot at the south eastern entrance to the Basin in March - I used to jump off boats in Pittwater in the 70s & 80s and swim for hours. I'm gun-shy now!!

That is the fish of a lifetime - especially give water depth & line weight!!!! Congratulations

Not the most exciting report, but a couple of hours i'll remember fondly. Some kids are born to love fishing. My 9 year old son watches every show, names 100+ species, and generally lives and breathes fishing. From the moment I went to work yesterday I could tell dusk would be peaceful, windless and coincide with high tide - a perfect time to drift over the Careel Bay tidal flats in Pittwater flicking hard bodies with a 9 year old. We were never in more than 3 feet of water - perfect conditions. He was using a 20 year old Producer minnow with new trebles. Just drifting, chatting, eating, chatting and casting! He hooked and fought 2 flathead, both around 45cm - and vowed never to fish with bait again........he'll change his mind when the kingfish turn up. No photos, because he learned an important lesson about not letting the line go slack, and lost both fish at the boat. It didn't mater - a perfect Monday evening on sunset, no one else around - just magic. Cheers

Pearl Jam makes the fish look bigger!

Fish of a lifetime! Brilliant.

Fantastic fish! Sounds like you've really worked things out.