Flounder are flat, bottom-hugging fish that sit hard on the sand and are great fun if you know where to look. Plenty of Aussie anglers chase them for a tasty feed, especially in shallow water where they can be spotted or worked up.
In Australian waters, flounder are mostly found over sandy and muddy bottoms in estuaries, bays, tidal flats and protected coastal shallows. They like areas with clean sand, patchy weed and gentle current, often in water from ankle deep out to a few metres.
Flounder feed on small prawns, worms, crabs and tiny baitfish, grabbing whatever comes within range on the bottom. They are ambush feeders, lying buried or half-hidden in the sand and striking with a quick snap when food drifts past.
Tide matters a lot, with flounder usually feeding best over the making and top of the tide when they push onto shallow flats and edges. Low light helps too, especially dawn, dusk and at night, when they tend to move and hunt with more confidence. Light to moderate wind can help by putting a bit of ripple on the water, but strong wind makes shallow flats hard to fish and can dirty things up too much. Small swell is fine in sheltered coastal areas, but bigger swell usually knocks around the inshore sand and makes them less predictable.
Keep it simple with a light estuary outfit, small long-shank hooks and a running sinker or paternoster rig that keeps the bait near the bottom. Fresh prawns, beach worms, nippers and small fish strips all work well, and small soft plastics hopped slowly along the sand can pick up fish too.
A flounder starts life swimming upright like a normal fish, then one eye shifts across its head as it grows so it can live flat on the bottom.