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Fortune favours the brave BUNDABERG
Luke Truant
The best time to fish for snapper this month is early in the morning when everyone else is huddled up in bed, unwilling to brave the cold. You want to be on the water an hour before sun-up, fishing the rubble and reef patches inshore, in depths of 12-20m. Two Mile is a good place to start. Keep fishing until around half an hour after the sun comes up, to give yourself the best chance of success. Snapper like 5” jerk shad style plastics. They’ll take pretty much any colour
on a given day, but I lean towards light and/or bright colours. I recommend fishing your plastic pretty close to the bottom, and use a double lift and slow fall action. Fish as light as the current will allow, because snapper, like most fish, don’t like the sight of a bait plummeting to the bottom. Now that the yellowtail scad have arrived, we can go live baiting for big reds and XOS gold spot cod. Spots like the End Leads and the Nursery are packed full of yellowtail at the moment. Fill your livie tank before you go, and aim to have lines down an hour before sunrise. The
gold spot cod are insatiable when you’re fishing livies. Please don’t keep all the big cod you catch, because you can thin out their numbers easily. They are susceptible to barotrauma, so please use a release weight or venting tool before release. Because the yellowtail scad haven’t been around for very long, the predators will be very enthusiastic about attacking your live baits. The reef spots within 20 miles are producing plenty of good reds and trout on live baits, and we are also getting XOS grassy sweetlip too. If you haven’t fished with livies before, I can guarantee you’ll be amazed at the amount of strikes you’ll get from large sweetlip. The biggest we’ve caught has been 7kg, and pound-for-pound
they fight harder than a red emperor. JULY FISHING In the coming weeks you can still catch snapper on the surface if you’re out reef fishing – just send a float line out while you’re bottom fishing. Last July is when we caught all of our biggest snapper on the surface in depths up to 55m. The biggest last year was 12kg, and it took a live yakka on the surface in about 45m of water. Just remember that the snapper season is closed from 15 July to 15 August. At this time of year, I target reds in shallower water. They seem to really like that 36m depth in winter. For the trout, the ideal depth range is around 20-30m at this time of
A great feed of mud crabs.
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JULY 2021
Big reds have been taking live baits with gusto over the past month.
year. It’s great fun catching them on lures, and there are several ways to go about it. One of the most productive methods is trolling divers around the reef edge, and you’ll also get a lot of shark mackerel and good cod while doing this. Trout are an ambush predator so I troll at a fairly fast pace, around 5 knots. Interestingly, the lure doesn’t have to be close to the bottom; a 2m diving lure in 8m of water will still catch trout. Stickbaits are also really effective, as are Waxwings. However, by far my favourite way of catching trout is throwing a chrome lure such as a Spanyid or Twisty over bommies that dry on the low tide. When there’s about 30cm of water over the top of the bommie, cast your chrome lure over it and commence a rapid To page 27
