Ryan Moody's online courses have built him a 12-year audience that turns up reliably for his live Q&As. The May 2026 session, streamed simultaneously to YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, was tilted toward what changes for North Queensland fishing as the trade winds bed in — and what risks come with the bigger fish that show up in the cooler months. Moody, who logged more than three decades as a Cairns-based charter operator before moving to online coaching, used the chat to walk through the inshore winter migration in detail.
The centrepiece was Spanish mackerel. Moody splits the population into two stories. One is the migratory schools that drift down from the Torres Strait as juveniles, fattening up on yakkas, herring and other migratory baitfish as they push south.
"By the time they get to the Townsville area, around mid-May, June, July, they're usually around that 6 to 8 kilos," he said. "These are big schools of mackerel and they're out in the shipping lane sort of halfway between the mainland and the reef. By the time they reach Brisbane and sort of November, December, they're generally larger fish up around 13, 14, 15 kilos."
The second story is the bigger resident Spaniards — two- to four-year-old fish in the 15-to-20-kilo bracket and up — that are starting to lock onto inshore pressure points along the Queensland coast right now.
"They will come into areas around headlands and different pressure points, especially where bait aggregates," Moody said. "Even in Hinchinbrook channel, you'll find all the herring schools coming in there. It's not uncommon to find them in a clean-water estuary as well. And we see them spearing out of the water there on the northern end of Hinchinbrook — 20-kilo fish spearing out of the water."
The rest of the inshore winter cast looks similar. Golden trevally, queenfish, GTs and the diamond trevally — Moody's favourite cool-month visitor for sheer fight — all aggregate in deeper headland pockets, around island spits and on bait-rich pressure points. Vibes, sinking stickbaits and soft plastics on heavy jigheads are all on his list, with metal slices for the macks. "That's a traditional older way of doing it," he said of the live-bait-behind-a-log-head troll. "These days a lot of us are now and the commercial guys still use that method of course. But recreationally we've kind of branched off and we're using slices for a lot of those fish."
"While you've got dropping water temperatures and sudden changes in water temperature — like with cold snaps overnight — especially in the shallows, it'll send them into deeper areas, and sometimes they'll just sulk for a week or two or more," he said. "Once they get used to the cold, they will start moving into more predictable situations and start biting a little bit more freely."
The segment that drew the most chat traffic was Moody's ciguatera warning. He told viewers his own poisoning came 29 years ago, while he was working on the marlin boats and eating a steady diet of mackerel and coral trout. He still recommends prioritising the smaller resident fish.
"I'd concentrate on maybe the 15-kilo ones," he said. "If you do get a monster, well, just make sure that you eat it in small portions. Don't have a massive meal night after night after night, because that will accumulate the — if they do have any ciguatoxin in them, that will accumulate in your bloodstream, and you do not want that reaching the trigger level where it triggers a ciguara reaction. I had it 29 years ago and it nearly killed me. I was paralysed for two weeks and 9, 10 weeks in bed trying to recover."
Moody traced the toxin pathway from blue-green algae growing on dead reef into damselfish and banana fish, then into the larger predators that read as fine on the deck. Bigger reef-edge coral trout, China-fish (nannygai), red bass and even the odd flowery cod can all carry varying loads. His take-home for the winter inshore mackerel chase was not to step away from the bite — only to space the meals out.