Over the past few months the waters of Queensland’s Gold Coast have been experiencing a rather unusual invasion.
Throughout the Broadwater and Jumpinpin regions, Australian salmon have been reigning supreme, showing up in schools and feeding on the surface on a daily basis.
In previous years Australian salmon, which are more commonly found in cooler southern waters have shown up from time to time on the Gold Coast, but never quite like this. Anglers young and old have been successfully targeting these great sportfish on a variety of bait, lures and flies. The most productive methods have been fishing with small soft plastics, which are allowed to sink and then worked erratically through the salmon schools. For those who are willing, small flies in a baitfish style presentation have also been very effective. Could this be the start of an era? Who knows?
Ben Job and a nice Gold Coast salmon taken on fly.
And the strange occurrences on the Gold Coast don’t end there. If you look closely at the centre of the photos below you’ll see a humpback whale right in front of Swan Bay at Jumpinpin. This is a popular area for lure fishers chasing flatties and jewfish. The humpback came in and swam to Kalinga Bank before turning around and swimming back out the Jumpinpin bar. The blokes fishing in the tinny apparently got the shock of their lives when they spotted the whale!
