Fishing in Pittwater, Sydney

Pittwater is a funny place to fish, it’s not very nutrient rich so the fish move in and out of the system depending on the food source.
It’s been patchy for me lately, one day good the next terrible.

Small bonito are around, like the whole NSW coast, they are breaking the surface from Scotland Island to Lion Island. It’s pretty easy to get some if small divers are trolled around Clareville and Taylors Bay. Some nice Kingfish are there as well, let the lure sink slowly under the bonito and twitch it, that way the bonnies will hopefully ignore it.

We had a fantastic lunch of Bonito soaked in lemon and lime juice with added chilli, it needs to be very fresh which is no problem at the moment.
Bream have been temperamental, the flats at Palm Beach were full of them on a falling tide last week, small diving lures were snatched almost every cast….then nothing. I can usually get a nice fish or two on dusk in the shallows on soft plastics, weird but I never get bored of doing that sort of fishing, especially from the canoe.

Ive been using diving hard body lures over the weed beds for some nice size bream, then using small Bass Minnows on 8gram jigheads on the shallow dropoffs at Palm Beach, you need to be very quiet in this shallow, clear water.

The amount of species that can visit Pittwater can be impressive. After some large seas this week I caught seven different types of fish, all on lures in the middle of the day. it seems the stir up triggered feeding time. On the flats at Palm Beach I landed Bream, Bonito, Snapper, Flounder, Tailor, Trevally and one 3 kilo Jewfish, great light tackle fun.

Frigate Mackeral enter Pittwater and Feb/March is the time, they can be caught on small SPs.

Ive been experimenting with slow continuous retrieves using the small vibes for Bream.

They seem to love the steady winding, it means you can fish for them in deeper water, the trick is to keep the lure in the bottom quarter of the water depth. Its a killer technique.