May will be a great month for fishing the Glenelg River for lure and bait anglers with higher water levels and cooler temperatures.

Late March and early April saw a closed mouth and high water levels in the Glenelg. Most of the landings had water within a foot or less of lapping over. The water clarity was also really good, which meant lure fishing was excellent with plenty of bream and estuary perch feeding up on the flooded edges. As always, on the river early mornings and last light are the most productive times to throw lures, and this pattern will certainly continue through May.

This time of year sees the fish well spread through the river but, with inflows starting to increase slightly due to either rains or environmental releases from Rocklands Reservoir, we should start to see spawning behaviours start. In a nut shell this means estuary perch will start to slowly migrate towards the lower section of the river while bream move higher. As stated, this will be highly dependant on the amount of water moving down the system but May certainly heralds the beginning of these movements.

As long as the river doesn't go into flood then clarity levels should remain good and lure fishing will still be a great technique to target bream, perch and mulloway in all parts of the river. Early morning and last light on days with little to no wind are prime times to throw surface lures hard into the edges and tight to heavy snags. Small poppers and surface walkers are deadly on both bream and perch. Later in the mornings as the sun gets up and into the day, deeper diving hardbodies and lightly weighted plastics are the lures of choice.

Bait fishers will also have no trouble finding fish willing to take a bait such as crab, shelled prawn or pod worm. The bottom end of the river in the estuary through to the top end of Taylors Strait and even higher to the caves are always very productive for bait fishing mid year. The main targets are bream and mulloway.

There are still massive numbers of small mulloway in the system and with the mouth closed they won't be going anywhere soon. At times they can become annoying with endless amounts of undersized fish taking both baits and lures but persistence can pay off with the odd bigger fish being caught.

Unfortunately we didn't have the usual influx of 10-20lb fish in numbers this year but there are certainly fish of this size scattered through the river and it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time to land one of these better specimens.