Recently a couple of mates decided to go to Hastings early and bag a few whiting.

Hastings boat ramp is probably the best boat ramp that services Western Port, with a 4-bay launching facility. They arrived shortly before 6am to find a line of boats, approximately 500m long all trying to launch their boats. It took them ¾ of an hour to get their boat into the water.

They fished for about 6 hours, caught 30 whiting and decided to go back a bit earlier to beat the traffic, only to find about 100 other boats all trying to do the same thing.

This time it took them 90 minutes to retrieve their boat. Can you imagine what would happen if you had to sit around in a car park for an hour and a half after doing your shopping just to get your car out to go home? I personally don’t fish weekends any more because of ramp congestion and ramp rage, which is quite understandable.

As the boating population has increased 10 fold over the last 5 or 6 years, ramp fees have gone through the roof and we still have the same old boat ramps to service all the extra boat traffic that we had 10 years ago.

If the government hasn’t got the money to build some new ramps, maybe it’s time to let private enterprise start building a few.

Surf fishing is a bit of a mixed bag at the moment. Australian salmon are still the main catch but there’s also been mullet, tommy ruff and flathead, with snapper and gummies being taken in the deeper gutters just on dark.

It’s a good time of year to fish the surf especially on those balmy summer nights. All the surf beaches are fishing reasonably well with good reports coming in from Williamsons and Woolamai beaches.

Below the bridge and outside the entrance on the 40m line, tiger and sand flathead are in reasonable numbers along with a mixture of other fish such as pinkies, gummies, ‘couta and yakkas and of course, the odd mako or two.

There are also schools of striped tuna working their way up the coast.

Above the bridge, whiting are still about in good numbers. Dickies Bay, Reef Island, Coronet Bay and Tortoise Head are all fishing well.

Snapper have gone a bit quiet. The Corals are producing smaller fish and the odd bigger fish is coming in from the deeper water off Cowes.

There were some good whiting about in mid-summer and I managed to catch a few good bags of fish to 900g.

Since then they have all but disappeared. If you can catch 5 or 6 a trip, you have done well.

Ben Cornford with a great catch of awesome whiting.