A sensational bout of late autumn weather meant anglers had plenty of different species to target before winter. Days of northerly winds created ideal conditions for targeting fish off the local beaches and there have been plenty of salmon around to keep everyone happy.

In these calmer conditions, wandering along the beach with a casting rod and a metal slug style lure is fun and a very productive technique. The rippling water of a school of salmon or the baitfish trying to escape them can be easily spotted when the sea has been flat. Find this and it won’t take long to get some action – usually about one cast!

Salmon are around throughout July, they just won’t be a shorts and bare-feet option like they have been recently.

These same flat conditions have been perfect for local divers to get amongst the crays and some impressive crustaceans have been taken. From 1 July 2017, Fisheries Victoria will introduce a three-year pilot program in which all recreational fishers will be required to tag the rock lobsters they catch and keep. Check the Victorian Recreational Fishing page on the Fisheries website for more details if you are into procuring a feed of crays.

There have also been plenty of salmon and barracouta cruising around the Warrnambool Breakwall recently. When a school comes past it can be action stations and provide plenty of fun for anglers there at the time.

The calm conditions have also helped anglers access a good run of school sized southern bluefin tuna that have been in the offshore areas towards the shelf region. Hopefully some of these fish will have moved in closer to the coast, as they often do at this time of the year.

Mulloway reports seem to have quietened off a little bit over the past month, but the bream fishing in the Hopkins continued to be solid. Plenty of 1kg+ fish have been taken lately, particularly by lure anglers fishing grub style plastics. Trout fishing the local rivers also fired up with a couple of decent rainfalls that broke up the bouts of fine weather.

Many quality fish over the 2kg mark have been taken. Bigger lures have worked well for us with the schools of big galaxid minnows the fish have been feeding on. Many areas of the local rivers remain closed during July, but the following areas remain open and provide a great cold weather fishing option. These are: the Merri River (downstream of the Bromfield Weir) the Hopkins River (downstream of the Hopkins Falls), the Moyne River (downstream of the Toolong Bridge) and the Gellibrand River (downstream of the Great Ocean Road Bridge.)