Winter is seriously upon us, with cold days and even colder nights and the fish are loving it.

Reports of fish being caught in several places around the lake have filtered through the usual layers of bulldust that can sometimes invade fishing conversations.

In fact, it appears that the pile gets higher in direct proportion to the number of drinks involved (and you wouldn't have it any other way).

Tailor, funnily enough, are the fish of the moment and there's some good sized ones amongst them.

Soft plastic tossers are complaining about the number of tails they're losing, as young (chopper) tailor go about their usual business of biting the tail off their intended prey and devouring it at their leisure. Charming.

They're also saying that there's some good 3-4kg models being caught as they smash 4-5 inch flick baits.

Regular lake fishos recon that they're trolling from favourite spot to favourite spot and catching a nice feed along the way.

Best lures for trolling seem to be chrome ones, but your standard diving type ones are also accounting for some nice fish but let's face it; when the tailor are on the chew you could dangle some of your bits over the side and they would probably have a go at them too.

Tailor are best killed and bled straight away and if they can be tossed into an ice slurry, so much the better. Eat them straight away and don't bother freezing them as they'll go all soft upon defrosting.

They're also one of the best smoking fish around.

There was one of those fishing comps on Lake Macquarie last weekend. You know the ones where they roar around the lake at 180-odd kilometres per hour, flog an area for half an hour (sometimes) and roar off again.

Apart from annoying the crap out of everyone else, these blokes do manage to catch some half pie decent fish and provide a quick snap shot as to which lure is working at one particular time.

The newish vibe lures, which are the most unlikely looking lure with the most amazing action, accounted for a good number of fish, as did soft plastic ones.

Brenton up at Get Reel at Morisset ran out of shrimp patterns in Lime Tiger on the weekend, so write that one in the diary for the next full moon.

The three top bream weighed in for the weekend went an extremely healthy 1.58kg each. Yep, all three fish were the same weight.

That's it I'm off for some exercise.