It is very hard to write a column every week when everything ticks along nicely and the same stuff is caught in the same places. There are a couple of things you hope for a big change in the weather and something strange being caught that is out of the norm. Well this week I have both.
With the change of weather and the onset of the summer weather patterns we see some evening/afternoon rains, this has shown an early bonus in the Bribie region. The two areas that have copped most of the rainfall is Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast and as we are in the middle of the two and we haven’t had a lot of rain we are reaping the benefits. The flows of rain runoff are coming from the north and the south and our waters are relatively clean so we are see a fishing boom here. All of our normal stuff is firing with good catches of bream and flathead but the most notable difference is the large amount of mackerel around our island. They are being taken from the southern end of the passage all along the front of the island and in the northern end of Moreton Bay. A lot of the guys that are trying to fish the inner reefs and wrecks are saying that they are in plague proportions. (What a nice problem to have)
Now to the unusual catch, although in the passage we do get the occasional juvenile golden trevally we very rarely get the big fish, they are normally up north in areas around the northern Sunshine Coast and around Hervey Bay. The fish in this week’s picture was caught just inside the shipping channel out the front of Bribie Island. Although I didn’t get an official weight on this fish I’m guestimating that it was around 8-10 kilo range. The fish was caught on the humble pilchard and was caught on the drift as Glen had pretty much given up for the day and was doing a final drift back towards Bribie. Golden trevally are a hard fighting fish and are also the best eating of the trevally family, they are a fish that can easily throw a hook as they have soft rubbery lips that are used to suck up sand to eat shellfish and worms in the sandy bottom and can be seen often in shallow water. This makes them a target species for fly fishos and plastics and lure casting fishos.
Bribie Island fishing report courtesy of Nigel Newman from Gateway Bait & Tackle.