While the water may be cooling the fishing action certainly isn’t and all it may take is a change of technique or target species to start turning things your way. When the water cools flathead generally head into the deeper waters of the bay and bigger lizards are a much more common catch. Soft plastics about 4-5” long fished on the bottom is a good start. Make sure you apply plenty of pauses in your retrieve as a lot of the time the strike will come when your lure is falling to the bottom.

Mulloway should be a common catch this month on the wrecks inside the bay. The Karuah River bridge is another great spot. Hayden Gillon bagged his first ever jewies a few weeks back at the Wreck near Corlette. He was using half pilchards and small strips of squid in broad daylight. Small live slimy mackerel are the ideal bait and are best fished about 1m from the bottom.

This month we should start to see better numbers of luderick caught in the bay. The co-op break wall is one of the top luderick spots in the bay and when they are on it produces great fishing.

Big bream should also be a great target in the bay this month. For a real challenge chuck a 100mm Squidgy Wriggler on an ultra-lightweight jighead. Although this can be a very frustrating way to fish it is extremely rewarding when you rip that bream from tight, oyster-encrusted cover on light line.

There should still be some good tailor fishing around Tomaree, Little Island and most washes this month. If you’re fishing from a boat, trolling diving lures like Halco Laser Pros is great way to cover ground and catch plenty of fish.

If you’re shore-based, casting diving lures and small metal lures is a great place to start. Tailor also find it very hard to resist an unweighted pilchard on ganged hooks cast and slowly retrieved.

There should be some nice drummer hunting in the washes over the next few months. Unweighted baits such as peeled prawns, cunjevoi and squid work well. A bit of bread berley should get the fish schooling up in the wash, and once you catch one drummer keep persisting in that area as they usually school up in numbers. You also have to be very quick to pull them from cover as these things have a lot of power for a small fish and you can wind up losing a lot of rigs and find yourself spending more time tying rigs rather than fishing.

For me June marks the time to store away the game reels and break out the snapper rods and reels. Closer reefs should be holding snapper of some size. Drifting around The Sisters, Cod Rock and North Rock with 5” soft plastics should cover some ground and help you to locate where the fish are holding.

For the bait fishers, floating half or whole slimies down a steady berley trail around any heavy looking reef gives you a good chance. The bigger reds tend to travel around the edges of the beach.

Bonito are usually a bit hit-and-miss in June, and most of the kingfish start to head out to the wider jigging grounds. Allmark Mountain is a great spot when kingies are on the wider reefs and it also produces the odd tuna. It’s a long way out though so it pays to do a bit of research before making the 28nm trip out.