Savouring the calm autumn weather pattern

The large autumn tides are coming in, with 1.2-1.3m tides quite frequent at this time of year, making for some great beach fishing. The school sized mulloway around the 80-100cm mark have been in good numbers at beaches like Alexander Bay. Fishing the shallow shore gutters along Thomas River has also been great for these medium size mulloway.

The best baits for targeting mulloway lately have been herring fillets or fillets of mullet, rigged on a snelled 7/0 octopus hook. Roughly two hours before the high tide is when they seem to bite the best, but you can still catch them all throughout the tide change.

Fishing the deeper beaches along Esperance, such as Kennedys and Roses, has been really productive for good-size gummy sharks, with some solid specimens up to 20kg landed off the beach recently. The best way to target gummies is to fish the new moon on these deeper beaches. The incoming tide and high tide are preferred, but not overly important – it’s more important to fish the new moon. The best bait for catching these is an octopus tentacle on a snell or a fresh herring fillet.

For the less adventurous beach fishers, there have been great numbers of salmon around. Big schools of salmon have been cruising around out west at Roses Beach and 14 Mile, and even at Fourth Beach there have been good numbers of them being caught.

Closer to town, the weed beds at Wylie Bay can be productive in autumn. At this time of year, you can expect to catch good numbers of breadand-butter fish such as King George whiting, tarwhine, sand whiting and big flathead. During those calm, autumn afternoons, it’s quite pleasant fishing down there.

The best bait to fish off the weed beds lately has definitely been prawns. I recommend putting them on a Black Magic KL 1/0 hook, which is the ideal size for hooking everything from small sand whiting through to 3-4kg salmon.

The tanker jetty is starting to come back into the squid season, even through they didn’t really head out deep this summer. While we’ve got the clear and calm autumn waters down here, presenting natural coloured squid jigs (e.g. browns, whites and blues) will increase catches off the jetty. In the 3.5 size Harimitsu, the lemon SP has been a great colour. It’s quite a subtle glow colour, which has proven to be really effective in the clear water.

Great numbers of large herring have been getting caught at both the tanker jetty and Taylor Street jetty. The best time to target the larger ones is in the afternoons right on sunset. A strong berley trail brings them in closer, and there are always a lot more around when the grain ships are parked up at the port.

All the lakes around town have been fishing really well for bream, with the water temperatures still quite warm and levels reasonably low. Anglers can consistently catch bream all day off the surface in these conditions. One of the stand-out lures is the Berkley Pro-Tech Bender, retrofitted with an assist hook in the middle, and fished subsurface.