Robbie Fishing set the tone before he had even wet a line. "The theme for this video for me is go big or go home," he told the camera, holding up a Blue Dog diver that he described as "the smallest lure that I've brought with me today." The rest of his tackle bag was stacked with oversized hardware: jointed surface wake baits, a big Predator wake snake, an Aussie Crawler and a redfin-pattern swimbait. The plan, on a mild second-half-of-May afternoon at around 21 degrees, was to walk into unknown water with his mate Sunny and throw big lures for a big Murray cod.
The pair set off down a creek that branched away from the main river, following it on foot for what the map suggested was roughly a kilometre. The walk stretched longer than expected, winding past carp-filled lagoons and flattened grass where kangaroos or deer had bedded down. "I love an adventure. I love exploring and discovering new places," Robbie said. To him, the uncertainty was the point. "This is how you find spots. There's a risk that there could have been nothing here."
There was not nothing. Robbie's first cast into a fishy-looking pocket drew an immediate hookup, a Murray cod that buried him in the root system before he felt it kick. "I told you they'd be in here," he said. What followed was the kind of run anglers daydream about. A second cod ate the big Blue Dog within a couple of minutes, and another cast produced a golden perch, a "yellow belly" he put at around the mid-40-centimetre mark.
"That's three fish in four casts," Robbie said, still half in disbelief. By his own count the trio came inside about three minutes, after he and Sunny had spent three hours getting in and exploring. "We fished for three hours, we caught three fish, and we got them all in about three minutes. How freaky is that?"
The kicker was the lure. For all the go-big talk, every fish fell to the Blue Dog diver, the smallest thing in his bag, and not one touched the surface lures he had carried so far. "Bigger lures catch bigger fish, and little ones, too," he conceded.
All three native fish went back. Robbie was at pains to explain why, having fielded questions from viewers before about releasing good eating fish. The issue, he said, was distance and warmth. He was kilometres and hours from the car, it was still around 20 degrees even in May, and he had no ice. Carrying a fish that far without keeping it cold, he said, "just doesn't sit well with me." Had he been parked nearby with an Esky, he admitted, the mid-40s golden perch would have been "the perfect eating size" and would have gone home.
He also credited a wardrobe choice. Robbie had deliberately worn his favourite fishing shirt, a holey veteran long overdue for the bin, because, he reckons, every time he wears it he catches fish. After the morning's run, retirement was off the table. "I reckon it's still got a couple more fishing trips in it."
The session doubled as a tidy advertisement for the explore-on-foot approach to native fishing: pick a likely creek off the map, commit to the walk, and trust the numbers. "Where there's one, there should be more," as Robbie put it.
