If you don’t know much about fishing then possibly the easiest thing which will pretty much guarantee catching a few fish would be drifting for flatties.
If you launched at Werribee South and headed north towards Pt Cook, or from Altona and went south towards point cook, you can drift almost anywhere. (Free launching nowadays). If there’s a breeze that’s more than light, you will want to put a small conical drogue ($20 from BCF at a guess) out the side. Hang the drogue say 4 m out on rope attached off whatever attachment you have about the middle of the side of the boat, on the side you want to fish from. Have two rods set up with two hook paternoster rigs (you can look up how to tie your own or use bought whiting snatchers or snapper snatchers), with the hook tipped with a small squid strip. One calamari tube will keep you in small strips drifting for hours, and for this stuff can be refrozen if not used. Don’t try thread the squid all over the hook. You just nip the hook point through one end of a strip that’s about 6 mm wide and 4 cm long (remove skin before cutting into strips), and it hangs straight off the hook-bend and wafts around as you drift. This works off the snatcher rigs or off a bare semi-circle hook. I just use gamakatsu size 6 or black magic KL size 1/0 semi circles. They are small enough to get whiting, but because they almost always hook fish right in the corner of the mouth are also fine for flathead of any size.
Just lower these until the sinker hits bottom and let out a few more m and put them in a rod holder and watch.
Some use very thin line but 12 lb is fine for flathead and whiting. Very thin line can twist etc - and loses gear on light weed.
Try a few drift areas but you should get a feed of flathead if you persist anywhere from a few hundred m to a km or so offshore. If there’s even the lightest weed you can also get squid. You can either cast and retrieve a squid jig or even easier, tie a single hook paternoster rig on another rod with a short (4-8 inch) dropper and instead of a normal fish hook, just tie on a squid jig with the sinker below so that when the sinker hits the bottom the jig is about 50 cm above the sea floor and always drifts at that depth.
Don’t drift over reef patches or you will just bust off.
With the bought snatcher rigs which have semi-circle hooks (or the bare semi circle hooks mentioned), you don’t need to hold the rod, just wait till they load up and reel in your flat head or whatever… same with the ‘sleeper’ squid jig paternoster.
You can but fancy gear but honestly a $40 combo from Kmart with 12 lb line will work just as well.
Flush your engine with fresh water every time you get home it it will rot out!
Only go out on the bay if there is very light wind and preferably off shore direction (W, NW or N for that part of the Bay). Any white caps/chop visible - you should not be out.
In western port where the tides are fast any wind-against-tide can make it very treacherous, and can happen in minutes as the tide turns from wind-with-tide.
At the ramp, get everything ready before you occupy a lane. People get ■■■■■■ off if you hold everyone up by undoing straps, putting bung in etc which you can do out of the immediate launch area.
Good luck.
These were from the Werribee side near Point Cook almost exactly a year ago. It’s sand bottom with some areas of very light weed - got one squid as shown. If you get a few squid you can eat most and keep one for bait - and never buy bait for this simple flatty drifting!