My report this month might be a bit vague, with the first proud addition to our family, Kevin Walmsley (weighing in at an impressive 4.22kg) responsible for many a sleepless night and a lot less fishing over the last month.

However, I have still managed to get out on the water on the odd occasion and have been keeping my ear to the ground.

The mullet netters have been operating in earnest on Kirra Beach in front of my restaurant and this usually signals the start of the sea-run bream which follow soon after.

July is generally when we start to target the bream in earnest on the Tweed and fishos can be seen catching them throughout the system. Any of the coffee rock reefs in the river mouth area produce the best quality fish.

The standard plastic-rigged jig head combinations will account for good numbers of bream fished deep, while whole herring, mullet fillets and chook gut work well for the bait anglers.

Deep diving hard-bodied lures fished tight up against the rock walls have been scoring some quality fish. Be warned, this is sudden-death fishing and can be fairly costly when you get done over by the odd snodger bream.

Deep-diving Lucky Craft Cra Peas and Jackal1 Chubbies have been the pick of the lures.

It is imperative to retrieve the lure down the face of the rock, bumping the lure’s bib into the rocks at the start of the retrieve. Once the fish hits, pile on the pressure to get the bream away from the line-shredding structure. It’s good adrenaline-pumping fun when they are up feeding against the rocks.

Tailor should be in full swing in the river this month and early mornings and late afternoon sessions should see you in with a chance. They move up and down throughout the system but the majority of the numbers are from the river mouth to Barneys Point Bridge in the Tweed Arm of the river and from the mouth to the highway bridge in the Terranora Arm.

When they are chewing they will eat anything from a plastic to a yabby so it’s basically a case of being in the right place at the right time.

On the odd occasion at the river mouth on the start of the run-in tide there have been massive schools of tailor smashing into the bait, with every cast bringing a fish.

It helps to keep an eye on the bar. When it is really flat, the river mouth area fishes well for them but if it is rough, fishing it shuts some of the fish down.

I recently took delivery of my new Lewis Typhoon boat and although I purchased it as a bream tournament platform with offshore capabilities, I have hardly used it in the river and most trips have been through the bar chasing fish on the inshore reefs.

The fishing has been top quality with more and more keen fishos starting to use plastics and metal lures instead of bait. Snapper, spangled emperor, kingfish and the odd GT have all been on the cards and I expect this action to pick up even more into July.

The only drawback is how cold one gets during the run out on an open boat in the early hours of the morning. All my mates reckon that if I went a bit slower I wouldn’t get so cold!

The wider grounds have also been producing impressive numbers and quality of fish with the charter boys keeping the punters happy with good numbers of reefies. Pearlies, pigfish, amberjack, kingies and snapper should continue to make up the majority of the catches on the wider grounds.

If you see someone tearing around the Tweed with a baby chair on the back of his boat then come over and say g’day!