By the beginning of May the Clarence River was fishing pretty well. The water was clear on the higher tides but wading around quickly stirred up the newly laid sediment. The floods had washed away a lot of sand and sediment from the rocky bottomed areas and dumped it in new spots. The rain continued but not on a scale that would cause more flooding.

The junior jewfish started to school up around the overhangs and drop offs in the river and sometimes I would catch 5 or 6 in row on lightly weighted soft plastics. The biggest of these junior mulloway were about 35cm long. The little mulloway love soft plastics but strike in a completely different way to flathead. Flathead smash the soft plastic with a hard and noticeable thud, where as the mulloway seem to slowly mouth the plastic before trying to swallow it.

The weather was cool and so was the water. I caught bream, flathead and some small trevally in the river. There were plenty of small jelly prawns and the bream were often to be found feeding on these, as they schooled up in the stingray holes on the flats. On several days I caught a bag limit of five flathead and kept the fish to feed the family.

The swell dropped off for a few days in the middle of the month and I caught several keeper size jewfish at Woody Head. I also hooked a few giant trevally on big soft plastic minnows. I had one session fishing the rock platform at Shark Bay on a falling tide. I caught a couple of small tailor just on dusk.