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Wandandian creek, the basin

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Sunday, 10 February 2008

Fail on the bream, win on the flathead

Taken on a Squidgy Stealth prawn

I've been eating flathead pretty much every second night over the past few weeks so when I figured the rain was looking likely to hold off for the day I started gearing up to try for some bream. Specifically, I was hoping for one of those 40cm+ specimens that I watched Michael catch (and release) just last weekend. He looked rather confident with the little bibed hard body lure he was using, so I matched that as closely as I could with an Ecogear SX60 of similar colours (predominantly gold). I tied this to an 8lb fluorocarbon trace attached to a 4lb braid mainline. And just in case the bream weren't playing ball, I took out another rod (with near identical line arrangement) with the trusty flathead fooling Squidgy Stealth prawn soft plastic lure.

I had only paddled the Quest out about 50 meters and was carefully placing the trolled SX60 into a scupper hole (neat surrogate rod holder that) when it was struck. I felt sure it was a bream of reasonable size, giving a spirited fight as I wound it in. To my surprise it turned out to be a pinky, probably just over 30cm in length. It managed to spit the hook just as I reached out with the net, which was a good thing because I would have released it anyway. This hook up did surprise me a bit, because it was the first pinky I'd seen up this end of the basin.

Taken on a gold coloured Ecogear SX60 hard body bibbed lure

I reached Smith's lagoon soon after and spent about an hour working for bream but I was only able to manage one hook up, which resulted in an even smaller fish. This one was a black bream and it was way too small to keep. As the afternoon wore on the wind picked up a little towards the uncomfortable side, so I paddled over towards Wandandian creek, where I was sure shelter would be easy to find. It was a lot easier going here, so I spent another hour paddling leisurely through it's centre, pausing to cast lures to either side whenever the moment felt right. I caught 2 reasonable fish in this time, both of them typical basin flathead (one of about 40cm, the other 42). The first one fell for the SX60, the other fell for the Stealth prawn. I'm not completely sick of flathead yet, and being the perfect pan-sized flatties, both were kept for the dinner plate.