August is always an exciting time of year in Tassie, it marks the start of a new trout season with plenty of late winter/early spring rains to help flush out all the systems.

The opening weekend saw very little action on the North East, many fish seem to be still well up the streams finishing the tail end of the spawning season however farther a field produced much better results. Some local anglers fished Tooms lake as an early prospect finding very cold conditions but great sport with bags being caught before lunchtime on both days although many other anglers thought the same with up to 30 boats on the water.. Also penstock Lagoon produced the goods early with a few anglers reporting early season bag limits and big fish.

The start of Spring will see the movement of a lot of quality Bream up our many East Coast Rivers such as the Scamander and the Swan Rivers. Good quality fish can be caught this time of year but will be slow to start until the water temperatures start to climb as the month progresses. This time of year offers good sport for all types of techniques, bait fisherman prefer crabs, freshly pumped nippers, mussels and red worms and fish them either lightly weighted or weightless. Some huge Bream to 45cm fall to this technique every year at this time and this season will be no different.

Already good fish are being caught on lures, although plastic fisherman will see slower action to begin with but it will pick up as the month progresses. A popular lure has been the Squidgy Wriggler  100mm in the Bloodworm colour and seems to produce the bigger fish but will need to be fished dead slow along the bottom to create a bite with plenty of S-Factor thrown on. Although the water temperatures are quite cool and hot bites are hard to find many of the flats areas of these rivers can fire up when the winter sun is high enough to warm the water up a few degrees. Here the use of hard bodies such as Bushy’s Stiffy’s, Lucky Craft Pointer and Zipbaits Khamsin Jr DR are proving to be good fish takers and at times the fish are being quite aggressive when taking the lure.

Offshore good bags of Flathead have been taken both off Tailors Beach just south of the Gardens and also off the Scamander River Mouth in about 20 metres of water however the Flathead have been patchy along the rest of the coast.

With excellent calm winter weather of late anglers have been able to head offshore regularly chasing Striped Trumpeter and Blue Eye Trevalla with quality Hapuka, Gemfish and Ling being caught as well.

Most of the Striped Trumpeter have been coming from the closer reefs but anglers also need to be reminded that September and October sees a closed season for Striped Trumpeter.

Further inshore Georges Bay has fired well with good quality Salmon around the 2kg mark, plenty of big Silver Trevally and lots of Tailor to 2kg as well. Many of these fish have been coming to the soft plastic lures with some anglers preferring to fish with baits such as Pippies and Prawns.

A tasty edition to the bay at this time of year is the “Snotty Trevally” or Blue Warehou; these are a hard fighting fish, great fun to catch and are very nice to eat. Most fish have been taken by jetty fisherman both on the Beauty Bay jetty and the Kerwins jetty and a common technique is to use burley to attract the fish and then small Sabiki rigs with multiple flies, such as the Wasabi Bait Catchers, and a small piece of chicken breast on each hook.

Large Garfish are still being caught in good numbers but will start to decline as the month progresses. They can be found mostly around the sea grass beds down along the red channel markers. A small float with a small #10-12 hook and a tiny piece of white squid bait is the perfect rig for the garfish. Whenever fishing for Garfish berley is as important as the bait and Ultrabite Stimulate Ground Berley mixed with a small amount of fish oil and sent in a trail down current will attract a school of Gars very quickly.