Fishing tips Moreton Bay in January

I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas break, ate lots of seafood and caught plenty themselves.

Inshore reefs and bay waters

The inshore reefs provide fantastic opportunity for those with a small boat or a kayak. The shallow inshore reefs around the Peninsula will have grass sweetlip, snapper, Moses Perch, bream and estuary cod. As I have said many times, fishing light is always the key to catching these fish and they will be most active at dawn and dusk and during the night.

Crabbing and Prawning

It’s a very crabby time of the year!!! The crab most caught by recreational fishers in Moreton Bay is the blue swimmer crab and these are abundant in Bramble and Deception Bays and off the Redcliffe Peninsula during January. If you are land based, Woody Point Jetty and the fishing platforms on the Ted Smout bridge are great land-based spots for crabbing.

It has been a long-standing management arrangement that recreational and commercial fishers must only retain male blue swimmer and mud crabs. Male blue swimmer crabs are bright blue in colour with white patches, longer claws and a narrow abdomen.

Females on the other hand are duller in colour with shorter claws and a much wider abdomen. Female crabs are more abundant in shallow areas (particularly the tops of sandbanks) while male crabs prefer deeper water and the lower slopes of sandbanks.

The pattern of rainfall will influence the location and activity of mud crabs. Overall, with more rain you should expect to catch more mud crabs, particularly in the downstream reaches of our rivers and creeks.

For the cast netters, banana prawns will be starting to be more active too. It is very early in the season for them and exactly where they will be is impacted by rainfall, but if you put in some effort, you should be able to find them. The deeper parts of the Pine and Caboolture rivers are the best place to look this month.

Estuary and Land Based

Mixed bags can be the order of the day for those who are fishing the estuaries and land based. Bream are active throughout our estuary systems and canals this time of year. While they take most baits, always have a variety on hand as the larger fish can change their preference from day to day. Small hard body and soft plastic lures will also produce bream, particularly when fished near structure.

Although the exact locations are always closely guarded, if you put in the effort working live bait such as herring or mullet or a well-presented lure close to structure, you can find Mangrove jacks. They are more common than most anglers realise. This method will also produce estuary cod which are active this time of year. Live baits and lures can also produce various species of trevally including golden trevally and bigeye trevally.

For flathead, Hays Inlet and the Pine River are some of my favourite places to target these species. The Ted Smout Memorial Bridge is a good land-based spot for them. In my experience January is not the best month locally for them, but a few are still around. Yellowfin and sand whiting will still be on the shallow bank and their edges in the Pine and Caboolture rivers, Burpengary Creek and Hays Inlet.

If you are targeting whiting and bream in the estuaries, also expect both barred and spotted javelin fish mixed in with your catch. They seem to get more common locally every year and they do love a yabby or bloodworm!

Beaches

If you are heading to Moreton Island, swallowtail dart will be prolific at times during the day on the northern beach between Comboyuro Point and North Point. It is a great location to fish in south-easterly winds. January is the peak of the spawning period for swallowtail dart which extends from October to April and this coincides with the peak of their activity along the northern beaches of Moreton Island.

There are two approaches for finding swallowtail dart along the beach during the day. You can find a good surf formation to, or you simply learn how to see them in the waves when the conditions are right. Visually swallowtail dart are very distinctive in the waves, they are rarely in very tight schools, but you look for a small number of fish that are high up in the breaking wave and are roughly equidistant apart. Ignore the shore break that is where the small ones are. If you keep watching, you will often find that the first few fish glimpsed are part of a much larger and dispersed school.

A light surf rod, then monofilament line of about 3 or 4kg and a No.2 hook with a running ball sinker is the gear you need to regularly catch this species. The best bait for them is the yabby although beach or blood worms and peeled prawns will also work. They are better eating than most people give them credit for, but you need to bleed them, ice them and eat them fresh. They are also great when smoked.

The western beach from Comboyuro Point to Cowan Cowan will have flathead during the day and sand whiting will be present on the western beach. Sand whiting can also be caught on the northern beaches in the late afternoon and evening with the stretch of beach around Dog Creek and Tailor Bight often producing better quality fish than the western beach.

Chopper tailor can also be targeted late afternoon and evening. I prefer to fish around the high tide and the early part of the run-out tide for them.

Offshore and Pelagics

This is often not the best time of the year weatherwise to fish offshore, but if you can safely venture out, expect a big mix of potential reef species. Pearl perch, teraglin, venus tuskfish, various cods and Moses perch will be the mainstays, but depending on where you are fishing, offshore there will be more tropical species including hussar and green jobfish. Shallower areas of coffee rock will hold snapper, particularly around Cape Moreton.

Cobia and yellowtail kingfish will also be around offshore as well as in parts of Moreton Bay itself such as around the Bulwer Ledge and the shipping channel beacons. School and spotted mackerel will be active in January as well within the bay and any of the good quality chrome lures on the market should do the trick with them. These mackerel are often hit and miss as they can move on quickly if there is insufficient baitfish to hold them in one location.

Daryl McPhee is an associate professor of environmental science at Bond University.