Typical for this time of year, the northerly winds have battered our shores and pushed jelly fish and weed into the bay and on our beaches.

The weed can play havoc at times, clogging rod guides, covering fishing rigs and making the beach smell like a toilet, but it’s all part of summer on the Fraser Coast. When the wind isn’t blowing there has been some spectacular fishing across Hervey Bay.

Sharks have been a problem out wide lately; shutting down some areas by taking every fish hooked.

The closer, shallow reefs have fared better with coral trout and cod responding to trolled hardbodies, plastics and live bait. Night fishing has produced coral bream, blackall and grunter on prawns, squid and yabbies.

On the flats golden trevally, queenfish, king threadfin salmon and flathead can be sight casted with poppers and plastics. The whiting in particular are all over small surface poppers during the day and are voracious on yabbies and worms at night.

The jetties and beacons are loaded with pelagic species with tuna, mackerel, queenfish, GT, cobia, tarpon and marlin all a possibility. Cast and trolled hardbodies, pushers, plastics, slugs and livebait are all worth a go. If all of those options are not working, try a pillie on gangs, this always produces something interesting!

We are experiencing the best black season on record in Hervey Bay and every week I hear of someone else catching their first marlin.

The Hervey Bay Gamefishing Club had their best results ever in their November comp with 13 boats tagging 158 billfish (157 black marlin, 1 sailfish) in two days fishing! Many boats fished exclusively inside the bar tagging nearly double figures and missing many more shots!

You don’t need specialist tackle or a big boat to get amongst the action as a couple of mates proved recently. They set off in a 5m half cabin and had a few average outfits that held 400-600m of 6-8kg line and they ran a couple of small pushers without using teasers. After 20 minutes of trolling around Wathumba a rod buckled and a marlin burst out of the water. After many jumps, and a few yahoos from the boys, a black marlin about 15kg was released after a few photos were taken. Easy as that!