DO IT IN THE DARK

Fishing is a game of luck. We think we understand how such instinctive creatures think and act under differing circumstances, but we are effectively using educated guesswork to try and fool one. Luck plays a part in getting a fish to bite and when your luck is strong, you can catch fish almost at will when those around you are struggling to get a bite.

What we can do to improve our chances is to optimise the presentation of our lure or bait to the fish in a manner they find attractive. Whether they choose to bite is entirely up to the fish. With our native fish spending most of their lives living within a metre of a snag or other structure, it makes sense to present your lure or bait within that metre so that a cod or golden waiting in ambush has little distance to swim to eat your offering.

Not all locations have lots of structure to target so we change our approach to target fish in these circumstances.

Blowering is an interesting place to fish. It is blessed with incredibly clear water year round, but has comparatively little structure when compared to most other dams. Blowering is well stocked with golden perch and Murray cod, and has veritable clouds of redfin, but mostly the dam’s reputation as ‘Lake Disappointment’ holds true with fish very hard to hook.

Night time, however, is a totally different scenario. The fish use the cover of darkness to emerge from whatever structure they found to hide in or under during the day and swim about feeding in open water. The natives don’t always bite at night, but Blowering is one lake that fishes better once the sun sets.

On the afternoon of December’s first full moon, I was fishing Blowering with Riverina Sportfishing’s own Dave Carter and his son Mitch. We were killing an hour or so casting small bibless minnows aimed at Blowering’s golden perch, whilst we waited for the sun to go down and the full moon to rise. With the sun down we usually switch to trolling AC’s and Custom Crafted hard bodies until the wee small hours.

This particular evening, Dave’s luck was shining landing a procession of golden perch on my purple 60mm Jackall (which always seems to be tied on the end of his Nitro), whilst Mitch and I were fishless.

Buoyed by his continued success, Dave fizzed out a long cast to a rock which often produces fish. In the fading light, it was hard to see where the lure landed but we heard a splash, so it was in the water somewhere. First flick of the rod tip and the Jackall was eaten. The fish dived and briefly snagged the line, before it moved slowly away. With plenty of weight on the rod, it was clearly a nice fish, but given Blowering’s golden perch are regularly caught over 8kg, we were thinking of a trophy golden.

The fish arced toward the surface and without the characteristic head shakes of a golden, our prediction of trophy yellowbelly was blown away when in the fading light, we briefly made the outline of a large cod before it dived back for the bottom.

Dave was perched on the pointy end of the boat and on sight of the cod, his head snapped around toward me.

“Did you see that thing? How big was it?” Dave asked.

“It’s a nice cod. forty or fifty,” was my response.

I was trying to play it down, as we hooked this beast using 20lb leader and a small Jackall. I had changed the hooks to ‘Owner’ trebles, but still we didn’t have enough gun for this fish. I was telling Dave I saw a forty to fifty pound fish, but the fish I saw was forty to fifty kilos.

On the light leader, the chances of landing this fish were slim, but we positioned the boat to bring the fish away from the shore and into the depths of Blowering Dam. Seven times the fish was adjacent to the boat and each time managed to dive back to the bottom over ten metres below. After an hour or so, the fish tired a little and we led it toward the net.

With Dave’s 1-3 kg Nitro singing with strain, the fish’s head and torso finally hit the mesh of my environet. With most of the fish still hanging out of the net, Mitch and I pounced on the tail, holding on for grim death so that the fish couldn’t back out.

At 149cm and an estimated 50kg+, it took all three of us to lift it into position for a couple of photos. With the photos quickly taken we lowered it back into the water, where on release it swam strongly back toward the deep water.

Cod of this size generally eat large food items and could easily swallow a 2-3kg fish, a turtle, a duck or anything smaller than its bucket sized mouth. The fact that it ate a tiny 60mm lure is testament that big fish don’t always wait for a substantial meal to swim by.

Dave is a skilled angler and guide, but even so he was fortunate to hook his big fish, even luckier to land it on the tackle being used, and it will be waiting patiently under that same rock for the next lucky angler.

© Jamin Forbes December 2009