Fantastic festive season fishing

It's that time of year again… already.

That’s right, it’s time for the bearded man in the red suit to bring us all some new fishing gear – so get your orders in nice and early and hopefully he come through with the goods!

December is a good month to chase a few fish around the Brisbane area.

School holidays are back, which means a lot more boats on the water.

I spend nearly all of my time chasing a range of species in the Brisbane River at this time of year.

Rivers such as the Pine and Caboolture can be very quiet during December, unless you’re specifically chasing mangrove jack or sharks.

Pumicestone Passage offers more options and can produce some fairly good fishing all year-round, particularly for breadand-butter species such as bream, whiting and flathead.

And it’s time to get the mud crab pots out again this month.

I don’t bother crabbing for muddies during spring.

Pumicestone Passage was pumping with bread-and-butter species such as flathead.

While there are crabs to be caught then, they can be a lot of hard work.

Pumicestone Passage was pumping with bread-and-butter species such as flathead.Mud crabs will get better as December progresses, and they’ll really start to fire up early into next year.

There should be a few prawns getting about in some of the holes later this month as well.

This will be helped if we get a few decent storms putting a bit of colour into the rivers and creeks.

However, there isn’t any serious rain forecast, so it could be another dry month.

As I mentioned earlier, I prefer to fish the Brisbane River at this time of year.

And my target species are snapper, threadfin salmon, jewfish and grunter.

I don’t spend a lot of time targeting threadies because they get a lot of pressure and don’t release well when caught from deep water, if you were wanting to let them go.

On a positive note though, they are excellent eating.

If I catch one, I’ll normally keep it and move away from the area so I don’t hook any more.