Fish Tales - Chapter 4 - 26 February 2022

Participants

Me – nicknamed – the Skipper

Roger Smith – nicknamed – Dodger

Target Species

Flathead

Co-ordinates

Wallis Lake – the Camp Elim Drifts

Methods Employed

Boat drifting flicking soft plastics (pumpkinseed and nuclear chicken formats) and hard bodied lures

The Tally

Fish #1 – Flathead Score Dodger 1 – Skipper Nil

Fish #2 – Flathead Score Dodger 1 – Skipper 1

Fish #3 – Tailor Score Dodger 2 – Skipper 1

Fish #4 – Long Tom Score Dodger 2 – Skipper 2

Also caught a just legal bream but we tossed it back

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The Story of the Day

When you live in suburbia and have a holiday house on the mid north coast, or any coast for that matter, you take your chances when you get them. 

My mate Dodger is entangled in just such a mire. He comes to the house, spends inordinate amounts of time on maintenance of the gardens etc and tries to get as much fishing in as he can before he is herded back to the big smoke.

He has been telling me of all these fish he has been catching in the shallows of Wallis Lake. Large fish worthy of pursuit as opposed to those we tend to catch in my local lake – Smiths Lake.

Its a less than favourable day but he is keen. Wanting to check out his “spots” properly I encourage him to use his boat so as captain he can manoeuvre it where it needs to go to find fish not unlike those he has been waxing lyrically about.

Turning up to his house at the appointed time, he is still in bed, even though it is not “early”. The mowing of his steep block has taken its toll somewhat but he is soon up and moving to get going. In his haste we scrape the boat on the side of the garage. No damage of consequence and we are soon off to the boat ramp.

It has been raining but as we set off the skies are devoid of downpour. Dodgers boat has a good bimini which may give us a degree of cover once the rain returns. It returns almost immediately and we watch as showers wander across the hills surrounding the lake and then towards us.

The rain does not dampen our enthusiasm though, from under the bimini we can cast and work our lures back to the boat easily enough.

Its not long before Dodger is working a reasonable flathead. It goes 50cm and boating it, means getting wet from the downpour that came at the same time.

The rain seems to have slowed the fish biting. Spot after spot we try looking for another hookup. Am I going to have another day like the last one with Hooligan where I go home empty handed?

Soon enough I get a strike and the score is evened up with a 45cm flathead. This one around the crab pots lurking ready to pounce on unsuspecting prey.

All of a sudden we start losing the tails of our plastics with monotonous regularity. Dodger adds a hard body lure on a line “out the back” of the boat. Its only impetus is the movement of the boat on the zephyr of wind that is available. Suddenly that loopy line “out the back” is off screaming away from the boat.

Dodger is into a good tailor, much bigger than we normally see in the lake. It takes some getting in but eventually succumbs to his actions. Perhaps we have found a school of them and now we know they are here we will fish accordingly.

Tail after tail of the plastic lures is being denuded from the lures and no more fish. We use all our pumpkinseed minnows and are well into our stash of nuclear chickens without a win. Dodger gets a hold of something that tears strips off the reel until the line is broken. Fishing with light gear this can happen. My mate Dodger tends to let the adrenalin take over and screw down the locking mechanism on the reel rather than let a fish run, but in this case I don’t think he ever had a chance.

We continue to lose tails until frustratedly I leave the plastic lure just sitting in the water, waiting for whatever fish it is to pick it up and run. After a couple of failed attempts I finally hook into something. Like Dodger I am into something of size, but unlike Dodger I can often be accused of skull dragging and rigging accordingly. Where he will use a 5kg breaking strain line I will use 20kg.  Much less chance of loss due to gear failure.

When finally I get the fish to the surface I am faced with a long tom at least a metre long, full of fight and a beak full of teeth and with no doubt on how to use them. This fish is as thick as my arm and bringing it into the boat does not seem like a good option if we want to keep all our toes.

I manage a few snaps of the fish in the water, loosen the line and thankfully the fish detaches itself and for a moment, eyes us off, then drifts back to the depths. In Smiths Lake we have often caught these predators, released them and then had them turn on us in ankle deep water, rather than return to where they were hooked.

A few more casts and a bream which would have just been legal is caught giving me the lead in the scoring stakes, before Dodger pulls the plug. The weather is closing in even more than before and rather than return home completely soaked we take the better option of an early exit.

Its 2.00pm when we hit the boat ramp. By the time we get back to Dodgers, clean the boat and deal with the fish its 3.30pm.

What started as a day where the only winner would be the weather, we managed to catch a feed. Although the Dodger claims of heaps of large fish were on offer we did not catch a multitude but those we caught were well and truly legal.

Maybe the weather will provide better conditions when next we hit Wallis Lake.