Sunday

I decided to give Bribie a rest and head up the Pumicestone Passage to Caloundra, to fish on Sunday morning. The weather looked good and it would be a run out tide all morning. High tide was just after dawn at about 6.45am and there was not much wind forecast for the early morning.

I wanted to see if the Flathead would be as thick up here as they have been down at the Bribie Island end of the Passage. I started on the sand flats, in front of the Bribie Island Power Boat Club. The terrain has changed quite a bit in the short time since I last fished here. A few weeks of windy wild weather can change the position of the sandbanks very quickly. I was not the only one surprised by the change. I saw three boats come to a shuddering halt as they ploughed into a sandbank that was not there a month ago. One skipper very nearly ended up thrown out of his boat! So take it easy if you have not been out here for a while.

The sea grass beds are also developing around this area, giving lots of cover for the fish. There was not much bait around which is not usually a good sign. I started with soft plastics and chose the 4” GULP Smelt Minnow, which I loaded onto a 1/8th 1/0 jighead. This is a very natural looking soft plastic that closely resembles a Pilchard. I waded along the edge of the sandbanks casting and slowly retrieving the lure with hops and jumps, across the bottom.

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Well, it was a beautiful morning and a fantastic sunrise but it was hard work, to say the least. I cast and waded, cast and waded. The tide was dropping which gave me access to a lot of area but it took me until 10.00 am to find a patch of fish. I had almost reached the channel markers in the centre of the Passage by the time I discovered them. Just after 10.00 am I caught a 30cm Flathead in about 50cm of water, close in to a weed bed. About 100m further on, I found a few more, of which perhaps 1 was legal size.

At about noon I was knackered and cooked so I gave up and waded back to the car. I expect this area has been fished fairly hard during the school holidays and there was plenty of boat traffic about. I am sure the fish are here somewhere but the ones I found today were not as big or easy to catch, as those at the south end of the Passage.