There are steep pinnacles and sheer ledges all over the place. There are some excellent fishing options at the moment, but the key to it will be the strength and duration of those easterlies we’ve been experiencing of late.

According to the Bureau of Metreology’s informative website, a high-pressure system in the Great Australian Bight will keep those easterlies right on track across the Top End over the coming weekend.

Winds of 20 to 30 knots are predicted, but at least there is no strong wind warning.

That means that the bigger trailer boats can venture out early in the morning – pre-dawn would be the go – and get settled on a spot before the winds get going, hopefully bagging a good catch by mid-morning and then punching their way home through the chop.

In their favour is the high tide at 9.10 am on Saturday and 9.54 am on Sunday.

These aren’t small tides, but you can’t beat a tide on the turn to get fish feeding.

An alternative option is to head out late afternoon – probably no earlier than 4.00 pm – when the sea breeze should start to kick in from the north-west, calming the seas and making for a very pleasant evening on the water.

Low tide is at 3.31 pm on Saturday and 4.22 pm on Sunday.

Clearly, both occasions are a good time to be wetting a line; but for comfort reasons, heading out of Darwin Harbour while the tide is still falling and the easterly is still blowing will make for a real bang of a boat ride.

To get the best of the tide turn and still evade the blustery conditions before the sea breeze starts to calm things down, a smart option would be to work inshore.

A troll around either East Point or Lee Point is liable to raise any one of several species.

A metre-plus Spanish mackerel or two is definitely on the cards, but a few cobia have been caught of late and this seems to be a good year for queenfish.

If you’re into sashimi as much as I am, then you’ll spend hours hunting down those erupting longtail tuna schools until you get close enough to nail one on a shiny metal lure or a barrel sinker, scraped with a knife to achieve glitter, threaded onto a 20 kg leader, and with a No 1 treble tied to the end.

Ideally this would be cast to a tuna school with a small threadline outfit, allowed to sink for a couple of seconds, then ripped in as fast as fast as you can pump those forearms.

Actually, there’s a lot to be said for spending a leisurely weekend afternoon jumping from one headland to another in Darwin Harbour.

Mainly you would troll, perhaps with three lures that covered different bases.

For example, a Killalure 10-plus Flatz Rat in chrome and blue is simply irresistible to queenfish, giant trevally, golden trevally harbour oddities like cobia and coral trout.

Your standard barra baitcasting outfit is a perfect troll match for the Flatz Rat.

That would be on one side of the boat.

On the other side, I’d recommend one of those new Classic F18s which can be trolled surprisingly fast.

I’ve had great success with the blue Bobby Dazzler with red stripes.

That also could be trolled from a barra baitcaster, or perhaps a light-to-medium threadline outfit.

Down the guts you could run something more enticing to bigger pelagics, a red-and-white Nautilus Macmagnet, for example, trailed from a medium game outfit.

The advantage of a spread like I’ve suggested is that it would not be prone to fouling out the back because each lure runs at a different depth.

The golden rule is to run your shallowest lure the furtherest back, and so on until the deepest lure which should be positioned the closest to the boat.

That way, you can make turns and the lures will cross over each other without fouling.

The current colder dry season temperatures are great, and they certainly do single the start of good offshore fishing.

Over the past fortnight, there has been excellent bottom fishing close offshore with big jewfish, mega golden snapper and other tasty reefies readily available.

There has also been plenty of pelagic action with tuna, queenfish, trevally, a number of sailfish sightings and the annual dry season run of mackerel — although the big macs haven’t yet arrived at the usual close-in spots such as Lee Point.

It was before the strong winds we’ve been experiencing that cobia figured in catches wide of Darwin, and a surprising number of coral trout were reported by regular offshore devotees.

The water has also been getting a good stir-up and, once the winds drop and the sea calms down, I expect that the fishing to really fire up.

That’s because one thing the rough conditions do is stir up plenty of small food items from the bottom and among the rocks and coral reefs making it accessible to the fish.

The result is that more small fish move closer inshore to forage on these tidbits and they are inevitably followed by the larger predators like snapper, jewies, queenfish and mackerel.

I expect we will see the bigger macs moving in closer to shore over the next couple of weeks, partly as a result of the enhanced food chain stirred up by the rough weather.