Reel Life | Snapper season sets sail

Rod said big snapper were on the bite both off the heads and inside the bay, as far north as Mornington and beyond.

Rod said that depending on the weather, good-sized snapper up to seven to eight kilograms were biting on mainly fresh fillets of salmon, pilchards, couta fillets and squid.

Depending on where he is fishing, Rod uses two distinctively different methods to fish for snapper outside the heads.

Rod rigs his line with a sinker on the bottom and a long trace about a metre up the line, he finds his mark and then drifts over it, while inside the heads he will anchor off his mark and cast several lines off the stern in a fan tail with no weight. Using no weight, just the weight of the bait to take it down to the strike zone, when a fish picks the bait up the line will go slack and you wind like heck until you feel the fish.

As Rod explained, he used the weighted method to combat the deeper water and strong currents, while the unweighted method worked well for the shallower water and lesser currents inside the bay; however, both methods were a must over reefs, as snapper were seldom found over a sandy bottom.

When it comes to hooking up to a big snapper, some say let the fish run or strike when you first feel a bite. Well, let me say that the fish will make that decision. If it is hungry, you will know about it, and if the fish is picky, you will be able to tell by the way it bites or not. Regardless of how it bites, if you manage to hook up with a decent fish, then hang on because you will get one heck of a fight.

Snapper can be caught from Queensland all along the east coast to Tasmania and west into South Australia and Western Australia, they do not reach the topics or the top end.

Rod says he has specialised in fishing snapper since taking over from Peter Smallwood, who in the past was known as ‘Big Red’ in honour of snapper.

Meanwhile, when not chasing the big red fish, Rod said he was watching a variety of species around the heads, including flathead, whiting, salmon, silver trevally, occasional tuna and trevally.

Rod said when the weather was suitable, he had been having some of the best fishing in the region for a number of seasons. He said he was also catching good hauls of gummy shark around most of the dive sites where old ships have been sunk to make artificial reefs.

Still on the saltwater, Western Port Bay is also fishing well and boats going out from Hastings are bagging good snapper all along the edges of the shipping lanes to the steelworks and down to the submarine.

There are plenty of whiting along the shallow grass beds, flathead off the sand and gummy shark in the deep around Phillip Island and San Remo.

North of the NSW border at Eden, John Liddell said most of the fishing was along the inshore reefs, between Boyd’s Lookout and Green Cape, with snapper, morwong and other reef fish, including rock cod and gurnard, while flathead were biting on the sandy bottom.

John said fishing off the surf beaches was producing big salmon while there was little action along the edges of the shelf, maybe some kingfish.

According to Graham Cowley, the fishing was about the same around Montague Island at Narooma. The only difference was the size of the flathead being caught on the sandy bottom as well as kingfish off the northern end of the island, and when it was too rough to go outside the bar, there was always bream and big flathead to be caught around the oyster leases inside the lake.

Now we head down south to Flinders Island where James Luddington said that while flathead and gummy shark were always on the bite, he said most of the action would not be until the summer months. He said that should anglers be interested in an hour-long boat trip, fishing off the shelf could produce albacore tuna or Tasmanian trumpeter, a bottom-dwelling fish considered one of the best table fish in the region.

Well, folks, that’s all for this week. Stay safe and good fishing.