>>501212I don't eat the rays, just catch them for sport while I'm waiting for snapper and big sambos. Rays are beautiful but you don't get enough meat to make it worth doing, but if you insist on eating them, you pretty much just cut off the wings and skin them to use cubed in curries and stews etc.
Rays have no size limits in most states, for sambos you have to ask along the coast and find out where the schools are as they seldom move in small numbers. Once you know where they've been biting, show up on the beach with a good view and look for a school and have your gear ready: halco twisty or 80-100mm poppers for lures or good old pillies on a pulley rig all cast well and will get you out to the school.
Only other way is to sit at a known salmon spot with pilchard baits and hope for the best, but most of the monster sambos are in the schools.
Mullies and flatties are a bit harder. I've never had that much luck on either but most people around here get the mulloway with live mullet and go up north for good legal size flathead. Most of the flatties i've caught and seen in the metro area were just under or way under legal size but things might differ for you.
Best way to learn about gutters is to find an estuary or rover inlet that goes out into the sea and show up at low tide, then you can see and take note of all the gutters and sandbars for when you go again at full tide.
Most experienced shore fishermen wait for a day when the high tide coincides with dusk or dawn, shark and squid fisherman tend to pull the night shift but having a boat or kayak can open up even more options for you.
Hope this helps anon, I definitely don't know everything about fishing and land based fishing can be crap at times; but you can still get some good fish from land.
