Campin' at Corringle

My new life of leisure continued last weekend with a camping trip to Marlo with a group of mates. Unfortunately Luna and Lando had to stay home – poor Lou was recovering from surgery:

She had to have a couple of grass seeds surgically removed the poor thing. A warning to long-haired dog owners - be vigilant when it comes to grass seeds!

Anyway, our plan was to head to one of the more remote east coast estuaries, but an uncontrolled bushfire meant all the roads in the area were closed (goddamit). So we camped at Corringle slips in Marlo – I’d never been there before, but it was convenient and gave us the chance to fish and surf within walking distance of our campsite. We got down there last Friday and after setting up camp on the estuary, we went for a flick:

I drew first blood with this little tailor (literally, because he bit me):

Which I followed up with a little flatty:

It’s a pretty tough place to fish landbased as there is limited bank access, but we did our best. My mate snagged this little EP at a jetty:

But the only other fish hitting the banks were little tailor:

With the light fading my mate hooked into something a little more substantial, and after a solid fight up popped this guy:

You don’t see many poddy mullet caught on lure - they pull some string!

We were up early the next morning and after a quick brekky:

We went to check out the surf beach:

We tried throwing some slugs around but the weed was horrendous. The surf sucked too so we decided to go for a bit of a wander. We climbed a hill and were greeted with this lovely view:

I could see lots of fishing potential in this area if you had a boat, but very few options landbased. We spent the arvo chilling at the campsite, and I though we might as well chuck a couple of baits out while we sat around. I collected a few crabs:

And it didn’t take long before a few breambo’s started hitting the banks:

Our English mate Tommy snagged his first fish:

Crabs were the perfect bait for this situation because they will sit on the hooks for hours untouched until a bream snaffles them:

   

That evening we headed back to the beach to have a crack at some sharks. I was hoping the 14ft rods might make the beach fishable despite the weed, but I was wrong. So we just enjoyed a ripper sunset:

And chilled out by the fire:

We cooked some fresh fish in the coals – don’t be fooled by the horrendous photo, they were delicious:

The next morning I was up before the sun to have a solo flick:

It was a perfect, glassed out morning. I flicked my lure parallel to this little jetty:

And it was whacked only a couple of metres from the shore:

Not a massive bream, but it kept me on my toes when it went straight for the pylons:

I flicked another cast parallel to the jetty and my lure was again hammered in close:

A nice EP. This guy pulled a fair bit of string - I was lucky he swam away from the jetty:

The fish went quiet after that -  I think I spooked them when I walked out onto the jetty to land the EP. So after a relaxing morning with our campmates:

We decided to spend the afternoon at French’s narrows. On the way we stopped at a lookout – check all the dirty water making it’s way downriver:

This wasn’t a good sign for the fishing, but it’s such a nice place I didn’t really care. We wandered the flats flicking lures:

But didn’t have so much as a bite. This green filamentous algae was everywhere and made fishing very difficult:

Out of desperation we even caught a couple of prawns and chucked them out on hooks, but 4 hours later I released the same prawns ha. When a live prawn doesn’t get eaten, you know there are no fish around. Luckily the sunset was beautiful:

And when the sun went down, the prawns were everywhere:

And they were delish:

We woke up to another glassed out morning on our final day:

We headed out for one last flick before packing up and had a pretty slow morning, landing more small tailor:

A couple of little flatty:

This bridled goby that wasn’t much bigger than the laydown he tried to eat:

And one nice bream:

We checked the beach again and when the weed was still around and the surf was still non-existent, we decided to pack up and hit the road. While we packed up we chucked out a couple of crabs and landed a couple more nice little bream:

And with that we called it quits. Considering all the recent rains, I reckon we actually did pretty well to catch anything. Luckily it’s not all about the fishing, right?

Cheers!