Leading up to christmas it had been windy everyday with NE sea breezes!! I was hanging to get a fish offshore but haven’t had a chance. So on boxing day I decide i’m gonna get out for a fish no matter what the weather, just probably not offshore. I organise with a mate to paddle right up Pine creek and chase some bass, GTs and Jacks in the arvo.
By the time that comes around it had started raining and I get that phone call: “are we still gonna go out??” i.e ‘it’s looking a bit too wet!’. I say that I’m going out no matter what but suggest that we should maybe go out somewhere that we can stay closer to the launch (to appease those who are less convinced!!!) We decide same launch just stay in bonville creek.
I was getting my stuff into the car and it starts to rain harder and I get another call: “How about now? You still going out? In this??”. I re-affirm my position: “Yep still going out”, but realising the tone behind the phone call I also offer the option of piking with no ramifications of name calling etc if my mate doesn’t want to go. That option is quickly taken and confirmed and I am now open to going where ever I want at whatever time. This new availability of choices turns out to be not a freeing development, as I then fiddled for over an hour and ummed and aaahed about where to go. After long deliberations I decide to head to the top of a local creek on the basis of a successful trip and report on this section of river by adrian.
Finally I get on the water around 5ish. The water was very fresh (and felt like a bath at about 26 degrees!!) and so I decide to head downstream. I had my basscada topcrawler on my big rod and my new hawk lure (fake chubby) on the little rod. The fish were just spooking from the surface lures so I stuck with the little rod and got a couple of bream. I was throwing the chubby replica around in about two feet of water over a little gravel race and got a few hits. I could see a fair few bream cruising around, so I was mostly just sight fishing, looking for fish then casting at them. Intently looking around for movement I see a dark shape come up onto the gravel bed. “there’s one!!!” oh. That’s pretty big! oh. That’s a bull shark!!! He was about 1m long and just cruised straight up to my kayak, hung around for a bit nearly right under me and then just kept cruising around the shallows. I threw a popper near it and it came up and had a good look but didn’t take it straight away and I didn’t really persist as it would be an unfair fight with my overkill 12lb leader!!! He stayed around for a bit until I turned on my camera, then he went back into the deeper pool of course!!!.
Blurry $5.95 fake chubby
Oh well, that was cool, and worth the rain (it wasn’t too wet). After that I had a few casts at some snags then decided to head upstream where i’d had more success in the past. By the time I’d dragged up the first couple of gravel races it was starting to get dark so I moved back to the surface lures. I started to get bream hits on the basscada nearly every cast but I only had single hooks and they weren’t hooking up, and they gave up after a few hits each cast. I threw the cheap chubby at a snag to try and get a hook up and I did immediately except that this fish was long and thrashed around on the surface, a nice little flatty in the fresh water!!!
Nice flatty from the sweet water.
I continued up the creek and got a big surface hit/boof about 100m up from the flatty. It was definitely a bass. I had a few more casts at the snag. Didn’t get the bass but got a a persistent little bream.
persistent fella with a big stomach!
Now it was totally dark and things started to heat up. I paddled a few hundred metres upstream to a tree covered pool with steep sides that had usually produced in the past. It was quite hard to cast as it was pitch black and there are lots of trees hanging down to the water in spots. First cast under the trees got a nice hit. I paused, no follow up hit so I twitched the basscada a bit then continued the crawling retrieve. No strike, so I cast back into the same spot. I wound about 2 feet and then smack!!!! I was on. Everything tightened up and line began to pull off the reel and I was promptly pulled straight in under the trees. Trying to keep my rod low to keep it from snagging I copped a face full of branches while keeping the fish from going back into the logs below!! I was able to push myself out of the branches and then bring the fish in to the yak while out in the clear. He put up a nice fight but kept it clean and came into the net with a bit of prompting! When he laid down next to a ruler he was 43cm, my pb bass!!! Got some pics and now he’s currently back out there adding cm by cm so that I can get him when he’s over 50cm!!!
PB bass- 43cm and nice and healthy looking.
mmmmm that's a tasty looking basscada!
After that I was running out of time but for the next 30 mins I got at least a hit from every place I tried (mostly bream hits) and got another two bass (both around 34cm) and a bream.
Another feisty little bass - 34cm
It’s great to be back into some bass for the first time this summer and great to find them again healthy and fat in my local!! It was also cool to catch flathead, bream, bass AND see a bull shark all within a few hundred metres of each other!!
