It’s a Day-by-Day Proposition
Phil Atkinson

The offshore fishing has been inconsistent around Coffs recently, with a mixture of green and blue water making it a day-by-day proposition as to what sort of conditions you’ll be fishing in. The best captures have been snapper to 7.5kg and some good-sized cobia to 20kg.
Both of these species have been caught by bottom fishermen dropping fresh slabs of slimy mackerel, squid and pilchard down on the inshore reefs. When snapper fishing at this time of year, it pays to make sure your hook and leader system are up to scratch because as the water starts to cool off, you could hook anything from snapper, jew, cobia, amberjack to kingfish.
The Patch, off Sawtell, has fished well most days – that is, except for the afternoon that Scott Amon and I blasted out there in his Yamaha Longboat. With the water purple and at 24.6°, we thought we were in for a great session. Unfortunately, the current, which was running at about four knots, killed off any chance of feeding a slowly sinking bait to the bottom. In the end, we resorted to heavy snapper leads and dropper rigs, which caught us a succession of small morwong, tuskfish, mados and undersized (55cm) kingfish.
Searching for Spanish
With the daily variations in water quality, the mackerel have been very hard to find, with only a handful of Spanish mackerel to 17kg being boated. As with last month, the best way to catch Spanish in such a lean season as this is to slow-troll live pike within a kilometre or so of the coast. The best catches of Spanish mackerel have been to the North of Coffs on the Moonee Reef system, and around the inshore reefs off Woolgoolga and Arrawara beaches.
On the rocks and beaches there have been good numbers of jewfish caught, with most fish under 10kg. I have heard of some bigger fish hooked on lures and bait from some of the broken headlands we get along the North Coast, but the three biggest fish hooked were all lost against the rocks. Best baits on the beaches at present are live beach worms, fresh squid and tailor slabs.
Interestingly, ganged pilchards will also work quite well on school jew from the beaches along the Coffs Coast, but don’t expect to start catching fish until a good hour after full sunset. Provided you’re patient and can brave the Autumn temperatures, on some nights you can set your watch for the moment the school jew will show up.
After a promising start to our mangrove jack season, it seems that the two major floods have messed up some of the mangrove jack movements from the inshore reefs into many of our smaller creeks. I flew down to Sydney the other day with former football and now fishing star Andrew Ettingshausen. ET had been in Coffs to get some mangrove jack action for his TV show Escape with ET. Local guide Dave Irvine put Andrew onto some good creek and harbour jacks, which they caught on live mullet and slimy mackerel. It does seem the jacks are still around, but at present they’re got a case of lockjaw as far as lures are concerned.
Bass back to normal
With the jacks so hard to come by, it’s good news for estuary lure-tossers targeting bass. It seems that the floods hit early enough in the season so as not to stop the normal breeding migration to the salt. At present most fish are still well up in the fresh, but some are starting to aggregate in the more saline sections prior to their Winter trip to the full salt.
All the rivers and creeks along the Coffs Coast have populations of bass, with the bigger systems to the south of town being the ones to target. Shallow divers and surface lures seem to be catching most of the fish. With an abundance of bass in our rivers, it’s interesting to note that spinnerbaits have not been taken on board all that enthusiastically by North Coast bassers. Most fishermen I’ve met preferring the visual excitement of surface lures and fly-fishing.