Well we are well and truly into winter now and boy does it feel like it! It’s cold and wet but there are still some good fish being caught.

Believe it or not snapper would have to be one of the more consistent species getting caught at the moment! There is a lovely little late season run happening at the moment and most fish have been rather large too.

Before we get to the snapper reports I will start off with a little bit of land based action from Lang Lang. There has been quite a few locals fishing off the beach on the high tide and picking up a nice feed of gummy shark. It can sometimes be a case of wading through a few small, undersized fish, but persistence will see you leave with a nice legal fish for a feed. Most of the reports are of fish being taken on pilchards and squid, but a lot of the kayak fishermen in the area get a little bag of fresh tiger prawns from the supermarket, and do quite well on them, so it may be worth a shot. There are also a few late season elephants still around in the shallow water too, and they’re good fun for those who haven’t caught them before.

I also received a report from a young fella by the name of Josh who has been fishing with his old man off the bank at Blind Bight and getting stuck into some very chunky mullet. Mullet are great fun for the kids, and are a good excuse to get them out of the house on a nice winter day.

Now onto these beautiful winter reds. It has been a crazy little run of winter fish, and it’s always exciting to see numbers of these fish caught, particularly for this time of year. Ian D’Argaville put in a few hours up the Bouchier Channel recently and bagged a nice solid snapper on fresh calamari. Bouchier is a great place to start for a winter red too as there are loads of gummies up there at the moment, so even if the snapper fishing is a little slow you can still go home to the family with a nice fresh feed of flake.

If you really want to get stuck into these snapper then I would most definitely be heading to Joes Island. Matt Jackson, Trent Dickinson and Scott McNabb have all spent various days up there, and all come home with at least one big snapper. Matt fished in 9m of water and got his on the run out tide on a fresh calamari ring, Trent also got his fish on fresh squid, and it weighed in at 7.5kg. Scott has also been finding fish to 6kg in the same area.

You will notice that the common denominator in all of these snapper captures is fresh calamari, it is 100% crucial for these cagey reds and lucky for us catching this tasty little critter is quite easy to catch. The Quail and Tyabb Banks have loads of calamari on them at the moment and the only issue we are having is that a lot of them are too big to use as bait. Black artificial jigs in sizes 3 and 3.5 are responsible for most of the reports at this stage, which makes sense as black standouts well in murkier coloured water that we get after a good dump of rain. 3-5 meters is the magic dept range,s and make sure you stay on the move. Setting up a nice drift is a huge benefit, as you will find that a lot of the squid will be confined to small areas so the action can often be thick and fast.

I’m not going to lie here, the whiting fishing has been far from red hot. We have been getting a few reports of some good fish still schooling up on the edges of the Middle Spit, but it is hard work. You can target them differently to try and maximise your chances though. Combine a whiting trip with a session on the squid. Rather than sit through two tides and hope the whiting fire up, time your trips around the tide. Get up on the shallow banks on slack water and get a bag of calamari and then move off to your whiting marks as the water starts to really move. Short and sharp sessions at the right time are the way to play it at this time of the year. As always, good luck, stay warm and keep those reports coming.