Not a lot has changed over the past month or so with the lake remaining closed and the water level slowly rising. The weather has been a real highlight with plenty of days in the high teens and very little wind.

The beaches continue to fish well with plenty of salmon on offer for the surf angler. There has been any number of smaller fish around 500gm and in order to find better samples, anglers have often had to keep moving. Bluebait and surf poppers continue to work well whilst walking the beach casting chrome slices is also producing plenty of fish.

As can happen this time of year the bream in the lake have been a bit patchy but the excellent quality has more than made up for lower numbers. Sandworm continues to be the most popular bait with a few fish also caught on local prawn.

Vibes are still accounting for plenty of beam as well. Anglers have really had to hunt around for their fish and there hasn’t been any one real ‘hot spot’. Better areas to try have been the Mahoganies, Pelican Point and the area between the river mouth and Swan Lake. A few good bream have also been caught around the edges on soft plastics fished on a resin head.

The luderick have been a bit of mystery with only the occasional one caught out in the lake over the past month or so. I think that we are starting to put a few pieces of the puzzle together and it seems that there could be quite a few that have headed up the river and taken up residence around the snags. There has always been the odd one caught at Dolly’s Garden but no one had really targeted them until recently.

The snags are tough enough when bream fishing so I can only imagine how challenging it would be to extract kilo plus luderick from the same areas. Plenty of tackle has been lost but the rewards have been excellent with some good catches landed. Best results are achieved using sandworm with very little weight or even under a float.

Things will remain pretty much the same over the coming weeks although conditions will obviously change if we do get some decent rain in the catchment and get the entrance open.