The Iluka region has experienced excellent weather over the last month, with an accompaniment of fantastic fishing – especially offshore, on the beaches and headlands. The Easter weekend and school holidays saw a busy tourist influx, with very kind weather conditions and many happy anglers.

Catches included spotty and Spanish mackerel north and south of Iluka taking pink trolled squid skirts, live bait and lures. Longtail have been taken outside and off the main wall and prefer live bait especially live garfish on floats. There have been some incredible stories of fish hook-ups with sharks getting in on the action and depriving fishers of some awesome fish.

Marlin were caught and released only a few kilometres offshore over the Easter weekend. Black rock has seen excellent cobia, snapper and teraglin, as has the fishing grounds of Angourie and the FAD. The main wall and headlands have recorded trevally, awesome-sized tailor, snapper, bream and tarwhine. There have also been some very nice-sized dart and whiting caught in gutters at Shark Bay on worms and nippers.

Great results this month include Kurt Murphy’s 5.1kg trevally caught at the Bluff, Ralf Karstens took a 7.5kg snapper taken at Black Rock, and Gordon Collins took a 15kg longtail tuna at Black Rock.

The river has experienced nice catches of school mulloway, bream, flathead and whiting. Better-sized fish and numbers are a bit further up the Clarence around the Harwood bridge and Maclean. This also goes for mudcrabs, but there are still some nice size down the river. Epic catches of the month go to Bob Gutteridge for his 4.82kg flathead caught at Browns Rocks (released), Brian Sullivan’s 405g whiting caught up past Harwood, and Ralf Cutter’s 1.34kg blackfish.

Please remember to take care if fishing the headlands and walls in Iluka, and to take your rubbish home with you, unfortunately there has been a lot of trash left out on Iluka Wall, which just isn’t on. Iluka is beautiful so let’s keep it that way.

Happy fishing everyone!