It's beginning to look a lot like Fishmas

A wild, wet and windy year is drawing to an end. The Bureau of Meteorology tells us to expect more of it though – which doesn’t bode well for the upcoming holidays.

However, if the weather allows, the fishing will be good. I did a little fishing over the past month but nothing offshore. And while there were some days that allowed boats to get out, I didn’t get to take advantage of them.

This month, anglers will be starting to think about mackerel. As the warm licks of current start to flicker into the coastline, there will always be a few mackerel taking advantage of them, especially towards the end of the month.

The bigger numbers of mackerel don’t usually arrive until summer at least, though if the water is warm and there’s bait around, mackerel are a definite possibility.

The author scored a mangrove jack while targeting trevally.

Out wider, there’s a good possibility of wahoo and mahi mahi cruising the current lines and deeper ledges from the 32s to the shelf. Nearing the end of the month, a few juvenile black marlin could even begin to show up. Now that would be a fun Christmas present.

Traditionally, I’ve been lucky enough to find a few snapper on the closer reefs leading up to Christmas. Baked snapper for Christmas lunch is always high on my agenda. Speaking of Christmas foods, mud crabs are a bit slow but will continue to improve each week.

We all hope for a great mackerel season, red hot mangrove jack sessions, feeds of crustaceans and lures getting smashed by anything hard and fast. Mangos, mud crabs, mangrove jack and mackerel.

Trevally are heaps of fun and quite tasty too. These were converted to sashimi and highly rated by those who tried it.

You’ve got to admit it paints a rather nice picture. Back in the river, mangrove jack are definitely on the move and taking bait and lures. I scored one on a recent trip to the Tweed River.

It was a bit of an accident because I was chasing trevally well away from any snags. The trevally were thick both bigeye and giant, with the latter a good size and great fun. As I’ve said before, I reckon our river trevally are greatly underrated by most people.

On tackle appropriate for the size of the fish to be encountered, they can be as hard to land as a big reef giant trevally. Flathead will be caught over the holiday season too and where to fish for them depends a lot on salinity.

Continual rain this year has kept fishing to the lower half of the river but even so, flathead love moving upstream when they can, constantly pushing the boundaries of the fresh. As I’ve said in the past, this goes for a lot of species, especially mud crabs.

Flathead are delicious but, if you’re visiting from interstate these holidays, don’t forget to look up the new rules regarding them.

With the school holidays coming up and parents still working for a week or two before Christmas, there are going to be a lot of kids out fishing their local waters. You can learn a lot from watching kids fishing.

For one, they often fish the same spot day in and day out because it’s close to home. They get their local drain, creek, canal or spot of the river wired because of all the time spent there through different tides, weather conditions and times of the day.

I had the same learning experience myself when I was a kid and it’s an invaluable lesson, and you realise you can’t write a spot off as fishless only because you tried it once or twice.

The other lesson that goes along with this is persistence – I know that often as a kid, you could see the fish, but it took a long time to work out how to catch it. The right bait, tide and technique eventually fall into place through trial and error.

Learning the seasonal variations of a particular spot is also part of the experience. So, these holidays, let your kids fish their local waterway but also watch them, join in with them if you can or talk to them about it, as you will probably also learn a lot yourself. Merry Christmas everyone.

Tweed to Byron Bay by GAVIN DOBSON.