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Fisho Writer’s Top 5 Photos

FISHO recently asked its writers to select five of their favourite fishing related photos and tell us the reasons why they rate them and how the the pics came about.

The next photos we’ve featured are from regular Fisho contributor and mad keen angler, Paul Lennon, who gave us the following rundown on his five selected images and what they mean to him.

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1 – Where it all began

My earliest memory of anything happens to be catching my first fish from the back of my dad’s moored boat inside Nelson Bay Marina at Port Stephens when I was around three years old. While I can’t remember the finer details of it, what I can remember are two things very vividly. The first is holding the line and feeling for the first time the strange tugging sensation coming from the mullet hooked on the other end of the line.
The second thing I recall was how proud I felt showing it off and holding it up in front of mum and dad who happened to have a camera there to capture the moment. This is by far my most meaningful and favourite fishing photograph – a picture that captured the start of an obsession. I’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars on fishing gear, boats, camera equipment and travel and will continue doing so but I know I will never be able to top this picture no matter what I catch.

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2 – My first beach jewie
I’m not sure if I enjoy catching any other fish more then a jumbo sized mulloway from the surf, but none will ever give me the joy of finally landing my first one. The time I spent trying to catch my first big beach jew was bordering on insane. No word of a lie, I dedicated a dozen or more nights a month every month of the year for over six years before I finally scored one. Throughout this time every aspect of my approach to chasing these fish was slowly refined until the point I knew I was doing everything right and it was only a matter of time before it happened. I’ll never forget that heart in mouth feeling of hooking up and knowing exactly was on the end of the line and thinking “this is it, you’ve done all the hard work, don’t stuff this up.”
When I thought the fish wasn’t far off the shore dump I turned my head torch on and can still vividly see the brilliant silver flanks reflecting against my light and that big red eye looking back at me. This is an image I’ll never forget and the process of what it took me to catch this one made it all the more special and pathed the way to many more.

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3 – Joining the 20lb snapper club
A snapper over 20lb from NSW waters is a real trophy fish and one that was high on my bucket list for a lot of years. The hardest thing about joining the 20lb snapper club in NSW isn’t actually getting connected to one, it’s trying to stop the thing. The bigger models also tend to be quite leader shy too so it becomes a very fine line in how heavy you can go and still get the bite. I’d hate to think how many 20 pounders blew me away before I landed my first, however, everyone of these fish I lost just amplified the joy and sense of achievement when I finally did land one. To make It even more sweeter, my first 20lb red was an exceptional one for NSW waters at 100cm and 12kg or 26lbs.

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4 – Searching for the 1m flathead
The holy grail of flathead fishing is one that stretches over the magical metre mark and I’ve been chasing a dusky of these proportions for as long as I can remember. While they certainly exist they are nowhere near as common as their stories are, and still to this date after years of searching social media pages and fishing mags I’ve only ever come across two photos of genuine metre-long flathead on brag mats. My appreciation for just how big a flathead has to look to break the 100cm barrier grew even more in early 2015 when I thought I’d finally caught the “unicorn”. After a long fight I slid this dinosaur into the net and over the side of the boat straight into the live well. I stood there for about five minutes just looking at her saying to myself “damn that’s one serious flatty, it’s gotta go close to the mark.” This fish was in super condition with a monster head on her and bulked up from the shoulders all the way through to the tail wrist and this reflected on digital scales as she pulled them down to just under 8kg. When it came to the moment of truth though it wasn’t meant to be as she came up just a couple of agonising cms short of triple digits.

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5 – The Spanish
I was tossing up whether to put a monster wahoo I caught in Fiji In as my fifth favorite fishing photo or this cracking Spanish mackerel caught north of Broome. In the end the I chose the Spanish because of the circumstances in how it was caught. I was fishing around 200km north of Broome off a place called Cape Leveque along with my good mate Allan Wilson who spends around four months of the year up there just fishing. It had been a fairly slow morning trolling for mackerel when all of a sudden we were smashed with a double hook up. At the start nothing seemed out of the ordinary as both fish screamed off for the typical scorching first run of a mackerel but after a while Al started to slow his fish down while mine was still sizzling line off the reel at a ridiculous rate. After about 10 minutes Al had a solid 15kg Spaniard boat side but the one I was connected to was still taking 100m runs. Twenty minutes later I really started to wonder just what the hell I had on as it was no longer behaving like a typical Spanish mackerel.
Usually after a few scorching runs even a big mackie gives up the ghost pretty quickly, but something was different about the way this fish was fighting. After about the half hour mark I finally started to pump some line back onto the 15kg outfit and could feel the fish coming up now with very little resistance apart from its sheer weight. Then about 30m from the boat my Lure, a Halco Laser Pro, appeared out of the water followed by a tail of one big and very tired Spanish mackerel. If you think Spanish go hard hooked in the mouth, try hooking a 27kg one in the bottom of the tail wrist!

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