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Bream and salmon keeping anglers happy
  |  First Published: September 2012



Beach anglers can't stop banging on about the massive numbers of salmon cruising up and down the coast this winter.

Ridiculous amounts of Australian salmon have been keeping lure casters happy for the past few months and they don't look like moving on anytime soon. In most afternoons, the salmon have been found close enough to shore along both Wild Dog and Mounts Bay beaches to easily capture by casting metal lures from the sand.

A metal lure weighing around 40g is ideal for this type of fishing and when the salmon are feeding you should have no problems catching a feed of fish. A good tip to help keep the salmon connected to your lure is to take off the treble hook and replace it with a larger single hook in 4/0 size. A single hook tends to hold in better, as salmon have soft mouths and will often shake a treble hook free.

Local angler Craig Rippon has had some fantastic days on the whiting which are schooling up just offshore of Marengo. Craig reckons the start of the incoming tide is producing the hottest bite with plenty of 35-40cm whiting being caught. A light paternoster rig loaded with any soft bait such as squid, pipis or mussels is all that is required to get into the action.

Offshore anglers are having good early season results on the snapper with plenty of 2-3kg fish coming off the deeper reefs. By deep I’m talking 40-70m. Gummy sharks along with the occasional school shark have also been caught in decent numbers on these reefs, so don't fish too light line and it also pays to have some wire traces made up and ready to go just in case a school shark turns up. 

Trout

September is a favourite of mine as it marks the opening of the Victorian trout season so it’s time to dust off the lure box and give one of the many rivers in this area a try. All the rivers have a healthy population of brown trout that will take a wide variety of lures or baits. It's just a matter of getting out there and having a go. This is a great way to introduce the kids to fishing as its active and it usually doesn’t take much to land a few fish which helps keep the kids interested for longer.

Bream

I've spent the last couple of weeks chasing bream in the Aire River estuary. The river has a big tidal influence at present which stirs the bream into action. I have had good success casting small hardbodied lures from the boat. Bream love a jerky, stop start kind of retrieve and are usually found close to structure.

Casting hard against the reedy banks and employing a short pause in the retrieve should see the bream smashing your lure and diving for cover; awesome fun and great sport on light line. If you arrive at the river only to find it blocked up at the mouth I’d give the bream fishing a miss and try further upstream for a trout.

Fishing small lures close to structure in the Aire River is producing some quality bream.

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