It seems to be that time of year again to start putting away the whiting and snapper gear and dusting off the surf, bream and trout gear.

The surf beaches are fishing reasonably well. The best reports have come from Woolamai Beach with salmon to 1kg and Baxters Beach with salmon to 1.5kg. Best baits have been white bait and squid strips.

Below the bridge there have been some big schools of salmon all along the coast, all around the 1kg range and some good tiger flathead taken on the 70m line.

Above the bridge there are still some whiting about; the most successful areas have been the Tortoise Head Bank, Gardners Channel and the bank edges of Rhyll. Currently there are a lot of salmon in the bay, ranging in size from 500g-1kg and have been most prolific in the main channel at San Remo.

Pinkie snapper are still about and the best area for these is The Corals and between Coronet Bay and Corinella. There are also still a few elephants coming in off the Reef Island.

The snook are showing up in bigger numbers off Flinders. There are still a few big whiting about, but as has been the case all year, in this area they are few and far between.

I was fishing down near Bird Rock at Mt Martha the other evening when a couple of blokes in a big 21’ shark cat came cruising past at about 12 knots. My mate said, “I think those silly fellows are heading straight for Bird Rock,” which at high tide is about 30cm under water (which it was at the time).

It was like a slow motion replay - there was nothing we could do except wait for the bang. It hit hard and catapulted onto the top of the reef. Luckily the blokes were okay but the boat would have suffered a lot of damage.

Unfortunately for them the tide was running off and when the big rescue boat arrived it tried several times to drag it off the reef with no success.

I guess they would have had to wait until 5.00am the next morning on the high tide to get it off. Anyway the moral of the story is if you don’t know the area where you are fishing, go slow or you could do some serious damage to yourself or your boat.

I recently had a couple of days at Lake Eildon and I was amazed at the transformation of Eildon from where it was way down in its water levels last year to where it is now.

Approximately 4m to go in height and it will be full, which means our impoundments are going to give us the best fishing over the next few years that we have seen in a long, long time.

I managed a few reasonable browns around the 1kg mark trolling in the Big River arm. The stand out lure was the Rapala minnow pattern trolled on the surface.

Eildon is now once again a great spot to fish and I will definitely be going there again very soon.

The author with a couple of reasonable browns taken at Lake Eildon.