When you know there is a nice warm cuppa waiting for you at home, those bitterly cold early mornings and late evenings are making it hard to stay out and brave the elements. They are for me, anyway.

But all it takes is one good fish to make you forget all about the cold and keep you fishing just for one more hour at least.

There has been fairly decent fishing all round lately.

Outside fishing has been consistent both out wide and in close.

In close the quality of snapper has been getting better with regular 2kg-3kg fish and a good sprinkling of 5kg+ reds in the mix as well as plenty of teraglin.

Bait fishos seem to be preferring smaller bottle squid or the old faithful floating blue pilly.

The lure crews have been having good success with the Z-Man soft plastics, the flavour of the month being the Streakz Curly Tails in pearl colour.

Early starts are mandatory, it seems, with the fish quite often turning off as the sun gets very high in the sky at all.

The most productive tactic has been to get to your spot in the dark and fish through the dawn period, which has been the hot bite.

The rocks and beaches have been a bit hit and miss lately, with some nice quality but not much in the way of quantity.

The beaches have been a bit more consistent than the rocks, with tailor up to 4kg and bream and tarwhine up to 1.8kg getting caught on bonito, if you're lucky enough to have a couple lying around in the freezer.

The breakwalls have been producing some nice eating-size school mulloway from 6-10kg.

For the bait fishos, they have been taking mullet strips but if you like chucking lures, we have been doing very well with the Z-Man 6" Swimmerz in gizzard shad on a 3/8oz jig head with a 7/0 hook.

We’ve been using 30-45lb Platypus Stealth leader and 30lb Platypus Super Braid on 6000 size threadlines and 9’ 6-8kg BJP LSG rods; the extra length compared with your average 7’ plastics rod definitely comes in handy on the wall.

It is a nice light combo with a good bit of poke,which comes in very handy when fishing the walls.

I have found in this kind of fishing it is important to let the lure sink on a tight line. Most of our fish have hit on the drop and no matter how soft or tiny the bite feels – strike! Some of our bigger fish have come from bites that felt more like bream than mulloway.

The bream and blackfish have been down on the lower walls, too.

The best bream bait has been mullet gut and if you're lucky enough to find some black weed, you will be in with a better than average chance of catching some blackfish.