Fishing Port Phillip Bay And The Snapper Classic With Jack Auld

Well what a week it’s been on Port Phillip Bay, snapper are everywhere and are feeding pretty much the whole day once you locate them and tempt them to feed through heavy burley and fresh baits such as silver whiting, squid, scad, saury and pilchard which have worked the best this week.

We fished the 19th Annual Snapper Classic hosted by Altona Boating & Angling Club and proudly sponsored by Haines Hunter Boats, Port Phillip Boating Centre and Yamaha Outboards.

Our team for the competition was Greg Hurst, who is the proud owner of the 600 Classic Offshore we fished out of, and the rest of the deckhands were young Asher Blake, Gawaine Blake and I. We started the competition at 2.30am Saturday morning and launched at Newport, we spent almost 4 hours on the sounder looking for big fish. Started fishing off Chelsea in 14m but the fish wouldn’t feed with all the boat traffic, so back on the sounder we went and got away from all of the other boats and found a nice patch of feeding snapper in 16m.

We all caught fish to just under 5kg and decided to go back in at lunch time for a rest, re rig and have a feed. Back out at 4pm for the arvo bite and what a bite it was, with 12 way hook ups for hours on end until we ran out of bait before dark. We used a release weight to look after the snapper and decompress there swim bladders and not one fish floated off and died, I highly recommend everyone keeps an eye out in the coming week as we filmed the correct way to release snapper to give them the best possible chance of living to fight again another day.

Sunday we slept in and hit the water at 530am and straight back into the action again with multiple hook ups and at 1030am one of the Nitro fishing rods took off with a 60m plus run and it was my turn to do battle with a Big Port Phillip Bay Snapper. After a 10 minute fight the fish was in the boat and later went 6.99kg on the official scales and ended up winning second prize in the main competition and first prize for the heaviest fish in the Haines Hunter Club.

Asher Blake also finished fourth in the junior section and if she was old enough she would have got third in the ladies section of the competition with a cracker 4.7kg fish. Asher at age 8 also caught over 50 Snapper for the competition all on her own what an effort in her first competition.

For the fisho’s fishing this weekend my tip would be still the east side of the bay that’s where the big schools of fish are. Areas such as Mordialloc in 12-14m, out the front of Patterson lakes in 16-18 and Frankston in 14m also plenty of fish out in 20m plus during the day so no more early mornings needed to catch a feed.

Until next week happy fishing & boating!

Jack Auld