Page 24 - Bush 'n Beach Fishing magazine

George with the first snapper of the morning. It is always good when the plan comes together.
This longtail fell to a Z-Man soft plastic.
WTips for Moreton Bay snapper and longtails
ITH the easing of COV- I would look at Peel Island, Mud ID-19 restrictions, I was Island, Green Island and the reefs keen to put a few more off Ormiston and Wellington Point.
Fishing Tips
by BEN COLLINS
hours on the Yamaha and get back Try to find structure on the sounder
on the water to chase a feed of fish. Flathead Classic teammate George Mole hadn’t been for a run in the Cruise Craft, so we teed up a trip for a Saturday morning that had good
had stayed overnight.
The number of trailers at the ramp
holding bait.
On this occasion, we stuck to our
weather and moon phase.
As we left the leads at Manly in
was another giveaway that it was going to be crowded out there. Ob- viously, the more boat activity, the harder it is to catch fish.
plan of trying to troll up snapper and then go looking for a tuna or two. While the technique of trolling for snapper has been around for years, it is a little new for me and a skill I am keen to further develop.
the dark, it was obvious we weren’t the only people keen for a fish that day, with the distant Harry Atkinson Artificial Reef looking like a small city with all the white anchor lights on boats, many of which I suspect
There are lots of places to troll for snapper and your best bet is to start looking at maps with contours lines, Beacon to Beacon charts and even your sounder if it has a detailed Navionics card.
Thankfully, I have had plenty of in- depth chats with Sean Colon, BNB’s resident snapper trolling king (he will love that), so felt I was equipped with enough ammo to give it a shot.
Spin or baitcaster rods in the 8-20lb range are fine.
Page 24 – Bush ’n Beach Fishing, June 2020
Once you have found the structure, is it simply a matter of driving back and forth over and around it until you get a strike – easy, hey? Well, it can be, but one of the key points you
To give you a few ideas of good places to start trolling for snapper,
George has already had good suc- cess using this technique over the past couple of years, so hopes were high despite several boats coming within casting distances at times.
Like most forms of fishing, you either need to find structure or bait, or even better structure holding bait, which will almost always include predatory fish such as snapper.
Thankfully, there is plenty of struc- ture around Harry’s, so it is easy to find, especially with today’s modern electrics (the setup in the Cruise Craft is a Furuno 295, which may be overkill for the bay but it certainly does the job).
* continued P25 www.bnb shing.com.au