mackerel

Mackerel arrive in northern NSW

IT’S hard to know where to start… Last month I struggled to scratch up a couple of photos due to the lack of fish I had caught. This month however the situation has changed, with good fish coming from all of, the different fisheries. Offshore hasn’t been easy with swell on the Brunswick Bar, but when we’ve made it out …

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Basking in bait ball action

WELL, it’s that time of the month again – where I whinge about the weather and how tough the fishing has been! Yes, the weather has been tough that’s for sure, and from most reports it’s the same up and down the coast. I find spring is often quite volatile. Heavy from the north as the temperature rises and then …

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Hop onto the headlands!

ANYONE who has caught a jewfish will almost certainly have encountered worms inside the fish. Be it live wriggling reddish nematodes – or roundworms – in the gut cavity or the smaller white spaghetti flatworm trypanorhyncha, both are believed to use jewfish as a host before moving on to another species. Headlands hop While the sight of either of these …

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Fishing therapy in Cape York

TOM and I were motoring up a small side creek on the electric against a slow run-out tide. The waterway was barely a cast wide but had already produced a few feisty barramundi and a couple of bumps from big blue-lipped pikey bream. Overhead, the tops of the mangrove forest were buffeted by typical dry season trade wind but only …

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Fishing flathead fun

HOPEFULLY things are starting to get a little back to normal, or as everyone else likes to say ‘a new kind of normal’, after COVID-19.  Species that have been in supply include school mackerel which have been in reasonable numbers, and plenty of squire (pre-closure) as well as our usual flathead, with a few trevally mixed in. So, as well as …

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Tuna and trevally biting at Hervey Bay

Tuna

WINTER is definitely here now. Very cold weather in May made temperatures drop quick. Sharks seem to be less active or not present, I can’t really be sure. Best of all, restrictions have been lifted to allow travel around Queensland. Hope this kicks a few more punters my way. Typical winter species have started to move and it’s exciting to …

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Two months fishing Moreton Bay

months fishing Moreton

HERE’S a rundown of my two months fishing Moreton Bay, mainly targeting pelagics and whiting (I did very little reef fishing), with most of the departures from Whyte Island and Manly. The end of December was the beginning of our two months fishing Moreton Bay and the lead-up to the new year got off to a good start, with plenty …

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Return of spotted mackerel to Brunswick Heads

spotted mackerel brunswick heads

IT’S nice to see the return of spotted mackerel to Brunswick Heads after they’ve been absent for a few years. These crazy little fish are as frustrating as ever but when they decide to bite, they can really turn it on. A lot of people I know around Brunswick Heads don’t like spotted mackerel as much as the larger spanish …

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Spanish mackerel in the morning

spanish mackerel morning

HI all, after a few weeks of cooler weather by our standards the estuary fishing has been hit and miss. We’ve seen great catches of good size whiting in most creeks one day but can’t find them the next. It has been the same story for blue salmon and most estuary fish. This is fairly common for this time of …

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Extended Swain Reefs charter part 2 – the fishing action!

swain reefs charter fishing trip carlo fishing charters

PICKING up where I left off last month on my week-long live-aboard Swain Reefs charter trip with Carlo Fishing Charters, we’d just wrapped up an incredible morning of fishing a glassed-out Great Barrier Reef. This unreal start to the fishing had us salivating, but not for lunch, rather to get back out in the dories and catch more epic fish! …

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