Peninsula Total Tackle Report 26/11/2009

It’s been a big, big week of fishing on the Mornington Peninsula. We have had exceptional reports on all species and a number of interesting sightings. For those with a love of all things shark, the crew from RIP charters reported Threshers around the boat while working offshore down at Barwon Heads. A great white was also photographed off Queenscliff and there have been some early rumblings about some small Makos off shore from Portsea.

But talking our first love for a second, snapper, we have had a great couple of weeks... Mt Martha deep has fired up in a pretty major way over the last fortnight or so. There has been a massive patch of fish sitting around the shipping channel in about 22m of waters. Like cows at pasture, you don’t have to sound far to find grazing fish. Exceptional numbers of school sized Snapper between 3 – 5kg have been taken in this area. The last few days, however, have seen some bigger models mixed amongst them. We’ve seen two 8kg + fish this week in the shop and another around 7.8kg was weighed in this morning. Fresh calamari has accounted for most of the big fish while we have seen a lot of people finding success with Sauries this year. Having said all that you don’t necessarily have to go far to find a bag of snapper. We’ve seen fish caught in 17m along the south channel off Rosebud, in 13m near the Rye wreck and around the artificial reef off Mt Martha. The best possible advice is to get out there and use your sounder to locate some feeding fish!

Peter Wombell

Peter Wombell now leads our in store competition with a fish weighing 7.85kg. Comp finishes 4/12/09, so if you catch a big one in the next week or so remember to bring it into the shop for a weigh and measure!

Joe Bruno

Guru staff member Joe Bruno managed a thumping 8.4kg snapper this week. Since our last report staff member Gavin was also wrapped to land his first Mulloway off Corinella, the true holy grail of Melbourne fishing. It was an awesome catch, well done Gav!

Gavin Fallon

After a two week period of hearing absolutely nothing but snapper, snapper, snapper, many anglers have now satisfied their annual fix and we are getting good reports of the many other species on offer at this time of year.

Whiting have turned back on after a fairly slow few weeks. We’ve seen good fish at Point Nepean and amongst the Sorrento boat moorings.

Customer Neven with a lovely 8kg Red from Mt Martha.

Squid have also been going well and there are still plenty of the big breeders floating around. If you’re landbased, Portsea Pier is still the local mecca for squidaholics, with plenty of customers getting amongst the action. We’ve seen squid to 3kg this week, just awesome! Just remember to bring your landing net...!

Sean Swift with a couple of nice school fish from 18m Mt Martha.

To round off ,how about this for a session - regular customer, Jay Furniss, fished Wednesday and managed to bag out on Snapper deep off Mt Martha, he then found a cracker patch of squid, again bagging in short order followed up by not one but two Gummy Sharks caught on the sth channel. One went 15kg and the other 12kg. Wow!

Remember, please feel free to contribute to our reports by emailing or phoning the shop. Our reports will now be heard on the 3AW fishing show on Friday night, hosted by Dave Kramer and Paul Worsteling.

See you in the shop soon.

Dan, Joe, Gavin, Paul & Sean.