Fishing Victoria Forum

After a very ordinary morning session at Sandringham I had an unexpected change of plans for Saturday night so decided to take advantage of it and head down on over to Point Lonsdale to try the high tide with a full moon. Now, I've never fished the Point Lonsdale Pier so on the way down the freeway with the wipers on 3 going a million miles an hour I am really beginning to wonder about the sanity of my plans for the evening.

Arrived at the destination circa 9.00pm, no other cars about and my god it is dark in that car-park! Get my trolley out and take a wander out onto the pier. Now as far as piers go, I quite like this one, good strong lighting all along the pier, rod holders, a wash-cleaning station and little hut out at the end. Obviously this must be a popular spot on its better looking days.

Out go the lines, with my usual #4 sinkers and pillies, and I quickly worked out that was a wrong move.... clearly the bottom movement of sand was burying the star sinkers as soon as they sat on the bottom... so I change to the smallest sinkers I had, just to keep it down and bouncing off the bottom. Weed wasn't necessarily as big a problem as I feared it would be. All in all I was not sure what my expectations were from this pier, I was hoping for a good run of bites, but despite my changing from bottom, to top, in close or out wide, I couldn't raise any action... except for a single 3-4 ft Port Douglas Shark which I managed to tire out and work around to the lower landing platform but broke the leader when I lifted it from the water (I really need to invest in a longhandled net).

Any after 3 hours of wet and windy, the tide had reached its peak, the bites weren't coming... I decided to throw in the towel for the night and resolve to come back another time, preferably during the daylight hours.

Point Lonsdale Pier
arr: 9pm
Tide: Incoming, 11.30pm
Wind: N 15k
Catch: Port Douglas Shark 1.2mtr

Some times it pays off and sometimes it doesn’t.
I remember having nights like that where it has been windy and spitting rain wondering if I should go home and bites started and ended up with a few big reds.
At least you were out giving it a go mate.
Hope you have some more luck next time

Great report (and your Sandringham post)....I really appreciate it when people post reports when they don't catch anything (always makes for a good read, & the info provided is gold)

I have walked that pier hundreds of time to check out the fisho’s mostly after having lunch with the misses I have only ever seen salmon caught and not that many. I have heard of large sharks being caught with baits drifted out but you have to be careful not to drift your baits to far as you are in a marine park. Great report as your Sandringham report was.

That pier has always been hit or miss... way more misses then hits for me over the years..

Interesting report bad luck mate