November is when south west anglers can really begin targeting the summer run of fish with some confidence.

Snapper season here in the south west should be firing up during November, often just a little later than the bays. Each season more quality snapper between 3-6kg seem to be turning up amongst the prevalent pinkies. With southern rock lobster season opening on November 15, recreational divers and hoop netters will be also looking for some flat seas to get a succulent feed of crayfish. Throwing a few plastics around whilst waiting for the next pull on the hoop nets is a good way to cover both the cray and the snapper bases.

This rise in water temperature, combined with a clearing of the dirty flood waters present at the moment should also see the estuaries fire up as well as fish become more active. The bream fishing locally has been very quiet the last few months. November is usually a productive time for bream fishing though as fish return to the edges and respond to more varied techniques. Estuary perch have been far more prevalent in anglers’ bags than bream in the Hopkins recently with most fish in the 33-38cm range.

Hopefully this season sees local areas begin to produce some mulloway catches. November would usually be a good time for them to show up in local estuaries or surf beaches, but they have been quite conspicuous by their absence the past few seasons. Fishing any of the surf beaches near the mouth of a Southwest river is a likely spot to encounter mulloway. There have also been some good gummy shark, pinkie snapper and salmon taken off the beaches with beaches near the mouths of the Yambuk, and Fitzroy rivers producing good captures of these species. Yambuk Lake has probably fished as well as any estuary for bream recently making it an excellent multi-purpose fishing destination.

As the weather began to warm up in late September things started to also warm up on the fishing front. The brown trout, which had been extremely hard work over the past months, came on with vengeance as the water levels dropped. Most fish were around 1.2-1.7kg but there were the odd much better specimens taken. The pick of them was a 4.2kg fish taken by Mick McMurrick in the Merri.

Despite that, the Hopkins was probably producing the better fish for those prepared to put in the legwork. There was also the unusual captures a few good rainbows taken in the Hopkins by anglers, escapees from Lake Bolac perhaps?

Strong winds have still been restricting offshore anglers recently but in the few windows of opportunity that have occurred have seen anglers taking some good gummy shark as well as blue eye trevalla for those prepared to head to the deeper waters near the shelf.