I love fishing the bay but don’t like fishing from piers because of the numbers of people walking them, jumping from them and swimming near them…it’s not always peaceful…

What I do like to do is fish from the beach…and it’s surprising the type and size of fish you can catch….even close in!

I spend a bit of time fishing the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, specially Dromana, where a friend has a holiday house I visit…

…aren’t friends great!

The Mornington Peninsula has a lot of shallow beaches… even at the end of the piers the water can be shallow and …not always best for caching fish unless you can give them a reason to come in.

You can fish these waters, without a boat, if you find the fish holding areas, work the best part of the tide and go fishing when the weather is right. Optimum times are incoming tide – morning or evening, close to high tide, overcast day, bit of wind (the weather…not the angler) and steady barometric pressure for the last few days…

…having all these occur at once would be great but you can still try when they don’t happen together.

You can then search the beach for likely fish holding spots – rocks, structure (including moored boats), channels or deeper water…anything that offers some cover, a bit of depth or a food collection point.

If you know what types of  fish live in the area –  you can tackle up to target them…and if you’re fishing close to shore then you can usually, but not always, expect them to be relatively small so your tackle should be light…

…and just a note on small fish and light tackle –  there are more small fish around than  large fish.

It is a real rush to catch a big fish and the bragging rights can be off the scale…but it doesn’t happen often in many ‘easy to get to places’ without specialised gear and experience. Don’t get me wrong, I target big fish – tuna, mulloway, elephant fish, snapper, Murray cod, etc. but these  are planned outings that I can’t get to as often as I’d like.

Most of the time I have to fit my fishing in to a family holiday, or a visit where I don’t get a chance to go after the “biggies”…so I go after what’s there.

If you use light gear it gives you a lot more feel, makes the fish seem bigger and can be a bit of a rush when you get the odd bigger fish!

I was at Dromana last September and I wasn’t catching from my usual spot near some rocks so I changed to the beach, right in front of the bathing boxes on the shore line.

I’d also seen Paul Worsteling, of Tackle World, try a similar beach…

…it was cold and no one was swimming so I gave it a try.

It was overcast and the tide was high….that was good. It was dead still and the middle of the day ….that was bad…but I kept at it.

There was a bit of a dip in the bottom only about 6 metres out so I cast over that…but I also used a float to see what I could get – I’d never used one here before but there was no wind so it wouldn’t get blown around.

The water was only about chest high deep so I set up the small float so the bait would almost drag on the bottom. I also threw in some pellet berley I bought from the tackle store.

I use silver fish as bait on size 8 hook tied to 2 kilo line on a 3 metre light weight graphite rod.

Once I cast in I watched the float closely and threw in half a handful of pellets about every 10 minutes.

After about half an hour the float went under and I struck into a small mullet – good result!

I cast in again and missed one.

After a while I was getting quite a few small mullet…and missing quite a few.   I stopped throwing in the pellets to see if something else was around…and there was…

…bigger mullet!

OK, so I’d worked out I could catch mullet!

But it wasn’t all bad…just seeing the float go under and then getting a positive hook up is always great fun….so this was good.

After a little while it went quiet. I checked the bait and recast. About 10 minutes later the float disappeared and I hooked into something bigger…and best of all it had a few big runs  while I was playing it.

It was a nice silver bream, about 700 grams…and on the light gear it felt like a marlin.

Cool!

After I released it, I kept fishing for another 30 minutes but got no further action…but this didn’t matter, I’d had a bit of fun in the shallows.

So, if you want to get into some fish and don’t mind the smaller stuff, then this is a good option. It’s easy to do and you can get your friends or kids involved and the whole outing can be ridiculous funs…

Not only that but the more experience you get on the small ones the more you’ll improve so you can target the bigger ones.

It’s worth a try!

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