While the snapper seem to have all but disappeared in Western Port, apart from a lot of small pinkies, the up side is the whiting are around in good numbers.

So far it has been a much better year than last year, even though they are mostly school fish in the 30-34cm range, there are a lot of them about. I took the grandkids out for a couple of hours on the water in the middle of the day and they still managed 25 fish. And I think if you were to fish early morning or late afternoon you would catch better quality specimens.

All the local beaches are fishing well with salmon to 3kg being caught.

I fished Kilcunda Beach just on dusk during the week but the wind picked up and chopped up the water. I was just about to go home when I got a typical ‘whack, whack, whack’ of a shark. It took a 100m run on 5kg of drag, then turned and with a lot of head shaking took off in the other direction. As I watched the line on my overhead reel disappearing at a rate of knots, the line went slack and it was gone. On retrieving my gear, the 20kg mono leader was nicely cut where the hook should have been. I suspect it was a bronze whaler.

Some good reports of makos and a couple of threshers have been coming in. The 40m line seems to be where most of the action is with makos between 40-130kg being caught.

There are also some good schools of slimys and yakkas about. If you berley fairly heavily while drifting they will come up the trail and can easily be caught on the little multiple fly jigs. They make excellent shark bait.

There are quite a few arrow squid about and you can use any old squid jig, as they’re not fussy. But you need to put it on a paternoster rig and weight it so it gets near the bottom.

There are quite a lot of whiting about and they are all over the bay at the moment. Places like Dickies Bay, Reef Island, Tortoise Head, Middle Spit and Tyabb Bank are all yielding good numbers of school fish. But if you are looking for bigger fish, try fishing the deeper channels on the slack tides.

The bigger snapper seem to have all but disappeared and gummies are few and far between. Hopefully we should start seeing more entering the bay as the water warms up.

I did a couple of trips to Shoreham and managed 5 whiting to 40cm on the first trip and zero on the second. I covered a lot of water from Flinders to Somers and could not find a fish. Talking to a few of the locals and they are all having the same problem. It’s probably the worst year that I can remember for this area.