Fun with flathead by John Grant

Most avid sport fishers associate bream with structure but for some reason they don't consider flatties around wharves, pylons, rock walls and reefs.

Flathead can be quite structure-orientated and good places to prospect include oyster racks, bridges, mouths of feeder creeks, moored boats, channel edges and weed-bed edges, not to mention rock walls and any place where rock meets sand.

At one spot in a lake I fish, a single tomato stake covered in mussels and weed always has two or three resident flathead lying around its base in shin-deep water come sunrise.

Flathead move into ridiculously shallow water at night, often only centimetres deep, as fresh impressions in the sand indicate.

With this in mind, when fishing the flats early in the morning start working your casts from close in at first so you don't spook any shallow-water fish...