We thought the walk would be quite picturesque, but it was pretty much 20km of this:
Luckily there was some cute wildlife to break the monotony:
After a gruelling hike we finally came to this beautiful beach:
And after a couple more km’s, we finally arrived at our creek:
Initially we weren’t filled with confidence – it was extremely shallow and didn’t feel all that fishy, and we were wondering if we’d just hiked 20km for nothing. But as we made our way further upstream, it started looking tasty:
We were hangin to flick a lure, but first we had to set up camp. So after finding a place to pitch the tent:
We started looking for water, but after an hour of searching the best we could find was this pathetic trickle:
Luckily it was enough to fill our bottles – mmm pond water:
With the camp organized we quickly rigged up the rods and made our way to a lovely section of the creek, and first cast my double clutch was belted, only for the hooks to pull. Good signs! Second cast it was smashed again, and after a short but brutal fight my line went slack again. This probably had something to do with it (old trebles - idiot!):
Goddamit! Ash chucked a cast in the same spot and sure enough his lure was whacked too, but his hooks held true:
Big perch - how bloody good! This pool quickly went quiet so we started making our way upstream, flicking at snags along the way, and it didn’t take long before I was on the board too:
Only a little fella, but it was a start. We caught a steady stream of fish for the next hour or so:
Including lots of pesky little tailor:
But when the light started to fade and nothing more substantial hit the banks, we decided to head back to the lair of the beast. And it didn’t take long before Ash had another solid fish on the bank:
I followed this up with the two smallest fish of the trip:
But eventually I managed a couple more solid perch:
By this stage we were catching almost a fish a cast, but when the mozzies became unbearable, we decided to call it a night. It had been an amazing day, in a beautiful place:
And we had a dinner to match it (ha):
A few of these land yabbies might have improved it a bit:
The next morning we were up before the sun and after saying hello to our campmates:
We were back at our perch spot. We whacked on a couple of surface lures and first cast, they were annihilated:
Not a bad double hook up (and first cast to boot)!
The surface bite quickly shut down and we managed a couple more small perch on shallow minnows:
Including this greedy guy:
Until the sun came up and shut the fish down completely. By this stage the tide was gushing in, pushing a heap of blue ocean water up the creek:
Check all the mullet that followed it in:
This probably pushed the perch upstream and although we would have loved to go and find them, we had a grueling 20km walk ahead of us, so we reluctantly made the call to pack up and head home. On the way we spotted a few schools of fish cruising in the breakers as we walked along the beach, and we just couldn’t help ourselves:
I’m sure we would have snagged some better fish if we had some proper beach spinning gear, but these little fellas still gave us a bit of stick on bream gear in the surf. The greater crested terns seemed to enjoy our work anyway:
We spent way too long flicking at these little fellas and it was almost dark when we finally trudged back to the car, but it meant we got to enjoy a ripper sunset on the walk home:
And that brings me to the end of a pretty epic trip - we're already planning the next.
Cheers!
(Photo: Ashley Olson)
