Around The Bay - Wednesday, January 4

With Jim’s Bait and Tackle

AS The Christmas decorations come down for another year and we all get a little older there are only 360 odd days until Christmas 2023, let’s hope that we all make it there. 

Fishing can be as cheap or as expensive as you want, and the more you spend doesn’t always mean the more you will catch. 

If you want to change over just drop in and see us and we can help you out, sitting around waiting for prices to come down, doing nothing isn’t that good for your health, walking the beaches, sitting on a jetty can be a huge benefit, especially to your mental health. 

This time of the year with so many visitors, we get asked a lot about the fishing around here and if it’s any good and it’s not until you sit back and look at the list of fish caught during the season that the answer becomes obvious. 

While every species isn’t for everyone, and it does go up and down a bit you have to acknowledge the variety that is possible and why it attracts so many to fish here. 

Most of the bigger snapper have gone and we aren’t seeing a lot over the 40cm mark but still plenty of good pan sized pinkies, the corals area has been the best. 

Whiting just continue to be very good and plenty of mid 40cm ones still being caught, even the smaller ones in great condition. 

There has also been plenty of baitfish around the bay with some big salmon amongst them. 

Also swimming with the salmon has been kingfish with a handful reported from Newhaven jetty and in Cleeland Bight. 

Gummies have gone a bit quieter, except offshore, and also a lot smaller as well with 100s of pups around. We have seen several good catches of flathead through the bay, ones you can actually take home and over the weekend schools of couta and pike.

Jetties have fished ok with the typical tangles and frustrations with people new to fishing in the current but we have seen some quality. 

All jetties have produced at some stage over the last week and when you talk about quality it doesn’t come much better than kingfish from Newhaven jetty. 

We get odd reports of kings from the jetties but all of them are really accidental catches, makes you wonder what could be possible if someone actually started fishing for them. Good sized pinkies to around 3kg and some big trevally. Calamari, whiting, salmon and flathead make up the rest of the reported catches.

Offshore is a little out of control with some quality fish being caught, tuna and kings the most chased over the last week with gummies not far behind. 

Gummies have all come from near the Powlett, while we are seeing tuna from Lip Trap to The Shank. Kings from two spots, Coal Point and Pyramid Rock. While most of the tuna have been small, some more stripey size than bluefin we have seen them up to 40kg and was told of a 96kg weighed at Hastings on Sunday, so if you are heading out, take everything with you.

We now have full stock of the Kool Bag fish bags back in and if you haven’t used one, even in the bay for gummies and smaller fish just ask someone who has. 

We will be opening at 6am all this week and will update our hours on our socials if we were to change them. 

We have an instore competition running all January, simply count the total number of one species on our photo wall and go into the draw for some JBT merch clothing and Evakool drink cups. 

You can enter as many times as you like, and the winner will be the first correct entry drawn out of the barrel.