The weather is bitterly cold in the mornings with warming days and the fishing can also heat up, too, if you make good choices.

The bream fishing in Wallis lake has been fantastic in the past few months and the fish can be huge. Lost lures, straightened hooks and shredded leaders seem to be the order of the day when you cast a lure along the racks.

Until early June the bream were right through the lake with good fish around the weed beds around Pipers Bay and Green Point. This month shouldn’t be too different, considering the numbers of fish in the system and still farther upstream.

The coastal bream should also push into the lower section of the lake with a bit of wild weather so you should expect a few snowy bream along the rock walls and around the bridge. Chris McConachie, of Forster Beach Caravan Park, managed three small mangrove jack under the bridge in three casts and I’m told there were some monster jacks at the end of the Forster wall.

The breakwalls have had a few guys fishing for jew and to date there doesn’t seem to be much joy but with persistence you may luck out and bag a fish or two. There has been the odd big flathead which is surprising, but we may be able to chalk that up to global warming and climate change – yeah, right!

Spinning for tailor at the ends of the walls has a good chance of success and the beaches also are surrendering some good catches. Bream along the beach on strips of mullet is a relaxing way to spend the failing light of an afternoon, but rug up because it is cold once the sun disappears.

Pilchards on ganged hooks in spots like Janie’s Corner and the north end of Elizabeth Beach will produce bream, tailor and salmon, while a school jew is always a possibility.

It is also a good time to pump a bucket of yabbies and do a bit of potholing. A rising tide just on dark is ideal to search out the travelling blackfish that swarm the washes into the rocky gutters in the area. Any of the headlands and rocky beach ends are worth a look and if the seas are calm enough, it doesn’t take long to get a good bag of bronze luderick.

While many would regard green weed as the gun bait for blackfish, from the rocks the yabby reigns supreme. Under the cover of darkness the fish will bite freely on the estuary crustaceans, as will some fine, big pigs.

If you pick your rock gutter or hole correctly during the daylight hours and come back later, you can catch the big blackfish virtually at your feet with little more than a pea-sized sinker, a No 1 Mustad 540 hook and a rod-length of line.

I reckon the fish that travel along the coast at this time of year taste far better than the weed- and rack-dwellers that plague the estuaries. One of the frustrations this time of the year is bream spinning and watching the hordes of blackfish, huge ones at that, darting away or milling around the washboards of the leases.

The weed beds and washboards will be favourite targets for the regular blackfish fishos and as the coastal fish run their course, they will filter into the lake and increase the numbers significantly. While daytime is the time for green weed, the yabbies will work over the weed beds after dark or when the water is discoloured or dirty. At present you don’t have to be too concerned with dirty water. The lake, even at low tide, is near crystal clear and the fish can be spooky.

The clear water did nothing to deter the 34 or so members of the Australian kayak fishing forum.net (www.akff.net ) crew that had a social weekend at Forster at the end of May. The members were presented with perfect weather and accounted for a string of species that included kingfish, tailor, whiting, bream (to 39cm), flathead and leatherjackets, to name a few.

Obviously some of the kayakers took to the headlands to score the kings and it is good to know there are some around the washes.

Offshore there are some good catches of flathead, snapper and some pearl perch. Remember that there is restriction due to the marine park boundaries so if you are visiting, check them out. It is a remarkable recovery the grey nurse shark’s (GNS) population has made since the marine park was implemented. Just two months ago a diver took a photo of GNS at Seal Rocks which had around 15% of the touted 300 to 500 remaining fish on the eastern seaboard.

The whole process is a joke and it is being revealed as such as more scrutiny is applied to the facts. I’m not against marine parks as such, but I object to the process and the fuelled political intrusion on people’s lives and livelihoods. Just look at the Cod Grounds off Laurieton – gone! No public consultation and a media release one Friday afternoon – is this just the beginning?