The best months are from November to April.Ī couple of great local spots around Portland are Narrawong beach and Discovery Bay. Starting out near Portland snapper are caught on all the offshore reefs and from inland locations. This is a ritual enjoyed by many Victorian fishermen. New bait-casters, new line, new terminal tackle, and they usually stock up on pre-made rigs. They generally go through a spending spree at the local tackle shop or give their credit card a jolly good workout via online shopping. They will spend countless hours preparing their boats and gear, ready for action.
Most Victorian’s are obsessed with sports and in particularly Australian Rules Football, and when the season comes to an end, these sports crazed fans usually divide into two separate groups, (well at least until the cricket seasons starts) the first group turn their attention to horse racing. The other more intelligent group of people will start to turn their focus onto hunting snapper. For Victorian anglers, snapper season is the pinnacle event of the year. Victoria during the peak of its season is arguably the most consistent snapper fishery on the planet. From the South Australian boarder right through to the boarder of NSW. Snapper are caught and encountered around the whole of the Victorian state. The following information has been gathered over a large number of years from seasoned veterans around Victorian angling clubs. It is the inshore migration that gets Australian anglers excited each year, as the snapper become within casting distance and or access to reefs via small power boats and paddle craft. The species can be located as far as the continental shelf and in as close as the bays and inland salt water estuaries. One thing in common between all the subspecies is that they move seasonally between offshore and inshore waters. This is a distance of more than 1300 kilometres. Snapper that have been caught, tagged, released and monitored in Victoria’s Mallacoota were then caught as far as Lennox Head in far NSW.
Sometimes grazing along the way or simply moving from reef system to reef system.
However, on ce they are on the move, they have been known to travel at a rate of up to two kilometres per day. Snapper typically migrate in a slow pattern, they may inhabit the same reef for months on end, if it has an abundance of food supply. South Australia has one distinct group, whilst Victoria has a subspecies to its western side and the fifth species stretches from eastern Victoria right up to the central coast of Queensland. Western Australia’s snapper inhabitants are made up of two separate species. It has been identified from years of research by Victorian, South Australian and Western Australian state government authorities that there are five separate subspecies, which carry different genetic makeup. Snapper can be captured right around the southern mainland coast of Australia.