Good topic....leaves me with mixed feelings on todays fishing.
Most notable fish changes I have noticed are the following:
Bream....catching genuine 1kg bream used to be normal....fish in the high 30's were normal in the 70's and 80's....biggest one I caught was 47cm but skinny as anything post spawn. In the past two years I have caught two legit 1kg bream.
Yellowtail kingfish.....in the early 80's there were large schools of simply massive fish in Moreton Bay....1.2 to 1.5m fish. About mid 80's NSW had massive YTK fishtraps being used....almost wiped out the stocks migrating the coast....Have not seen one over 1.2m in decades.
Snapper....numbers have not changed much but average capture sizes are about 1/2 the size of the 70's is most areas I have fished. Interestingly snapper were either bait or trolled hard bodies back then and plastics didn't work well....plastics have taken over, but I have noticed a bit of decline in the past 6 years in two places that hold decent fish....bait is still catching the same amount.
Sharks....seasonal for me and I didn't target them too often but I don't see the numbers of sharks I used to in the 70's and 80's.....I remember seeing them in the hot water outlet of the power station in frightening numbers, dozens visible any time of the day or night.In the Bribie Passage we used to lose decent snapper and jew to sharks fairly regularly back in those days...I have lost fewer than 5 fish in the past decade to sharks. I know lots of guys have real problems with them these days, but I just don't have the issue enough to bother me.
Gold spot cod......they are bloody tiny these days on average. I could manage 80cm cod every run to the port in the 80's....a 50cm cod now is noteworthy.
The biggest changes though are fishermen and women.....numbers are simply massive now and lots of those are decked out with high tech sounders and GPS units....Sure most don't use them well but still quite a lot use them effectively and catch lots of fish.....and this brings forward the next point.
Fish education.....catch and release might be good for fish stocks but it does educate them about the lures or baits we use. The "in" lure to use today gets flogged in the faces of the fish so much they learn to not touch that lure. Now catch and release is essential for all undersized fish and I fish myself also selective of the size of fish I will harvest.....I will not take snapper under 50cm for example....so I am guilty of educating the fish with the lures I use too.
I recently dug out an old lure box from the 80's....I will be giving these lures a run heavily over this winter to see how they go.....will let you know.
Also of note here is the environment.....it has changed massively in a lot of places, some better and some worse. In the 80's Redcliffe tides ran south for the incoming and north for the outgoing all the way up to Scarborough reef and probably beyond....todays water movement is a slow constant southward current and no north movement at all....This occurred with building Fishermans Island at the Port. The reefs off Redcliffe are well silted these days as well.
Water quality of the Brisbane River is far better today than in the 80's up to Breakfast Creek....not much data outside of that though. We had regular droughts back then as well....salinity levels were higher then than in the past 15 years with the constant flushes happening.....results show in the captures.
In the mid 80's there was a quite severe drought where we saw lots of fish that were normally offshore being caught inshore. Pearl Perch land based around the Tweed and on the sunshine coast headlands....spanish mackerel in Bramble Bay...cobia at Dohles Rocks....YTK at Shorncliffe pier.
