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Surf action making waves
  |  First Published: June 2016



It’s been another great month of fishing off the surf and perhaps the best fishing we have seen this season, but as the water temperature cools we will see an influx of cold water species such as the Australia salmon.

I’ll talk a little about the past month first, and probably the main thing to note was a water temperature drop. It wasn’t a massive drop, but it got down to around the 17-18°C mark, which is, in fact, a great water temperature for all species available in Victoria.

Probably the most common catch were the elephant fish. Anglers were catching large amounts of these great fish, and some anglers reported catching up to 10 per session. Just remember elephants have a bag limit of one per person. All were caught during the evening, and mostly on squid baits. The elephants leave our area just yet either, we normally see them through until the end of May. However, if the weather holds up and some warmer currents stay around, they could go well into June!

The gummy sharks were fantastic as well, although we didn’t see any massive ones, with most around the 1m mark and lots of undersize ones as well. Most have been caught in the evening around that 7pm through until midnight stage using squid and blue bait. Gummy numbers will drop off dramatically once that water temperature falls under 14°C, which is usually in June, but you can never be sure with gummies. Gummies usually get replaced by those much-hated draughtboard sharks.

The salmon really came on strong this month and we saw some massive ones caught, with some up to almost 70cm. They were caught anytime during the day or night and were mostly caught on blue bait and occasionally squid. They seem to bite hard between Golden Beach and Woodside, yet we heard of plenty around Loch Sport on as well.

A great activity for next month will be to spin for salmon. As that water cools, we will get larger numbers of salmon and if it doesn’t cool too much, those really big salmon that we have had over the past month will hang around.

If you want a lot of fun, try getting a 9ft spin rod and a small reel spooled with braid and take down a handful of metal lures and walk the beach casting. It’s some of the best fishing that can be had in Victoria, and when you hook one of those 3kg fish, it will make you wonder why you haven’t been doing this before!

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