I’ve had a love/hate relationship with winter over many years now. There are many things I hate when the weather cools down. Having to put a heap of clothes on, losing daylight savings, cold mornings and having to split firewood are just a few but the worst is the fact that much of my summer fishing shuts down. My beloved flats fishing is out when it gets cold. The local estuaries certainly slow down but are still fishable for a flathead or jewie. The blackfish from the local rocks start to slow as they move into the estuaries to breed. I used to find winter quite depressing years ago but that was before I discovered our local inshore snapper fishing during the cooler months. That realisation came slowly. It wasn’t just an overnight thing where I caught a couple of snapper in June and all of a sudden started getting regular catches.
It was about 20 years ago when we started fishing a local rock platform with bottom baits in winter. We caught some good snapper back then on overhead gear using four ounce snapper leads and octopus legs and salted bonito for
