AFTER my father’s productive sessions in the Hawkesbury River last weekend I was keen to get out there and see what all the fuss was about. This has been the first opportunity for me to wet a line since the birth of my daughter a few weeks back. In tow, I had my great mate Christian Orsini and his work colleague Graeme Street.
Two things made this session so interesting. One, Graeme is a reader of Fisho and was keen to see if could put my money where my mouth was. I heard him remark throughout the day that fishing journos are not the most trustworthy of sources. Perhaps that’s true for other publications!
The second factor – Graeme has a holiday house on the Hawkesbury River adjacent to one of the best reefs in the entire system so he was keen to see how to fish the area and what lures to use. I did raise expectations by saying we should catch a jewie and some big dusky flathead smackbang in his backyard.
We hit the water at 6pm not more than a few hundred metres from Graeme’s holiday house. My third cast in and a nice little soapy came to the boat on a 5″ Berkley Jerk Minnow. Prediction one complete!
On Christian’s fifth cast a beautiful 75cm lizard was also boated. Prediction two complete!
In five minutes we’d managed to achieve what we set out to do. The look on Graeme’s face was priceless. He had fluked the best spot on the river to buy a house and now we could see his mind boggle at the limitless opportunities. It was great to watch.
Once the run-out tide picked up we made a beeline to the mouth of the river to hit some flatties and bream. The action was instantaneous. While fish didn’t come in hand over fist, it was consistent action all day on both the last of the outgoing and the beginning of the incoming tide. We managed to snare over 30 flathead, some decent tailor to 50cms, a rogue spotted mackerel that forgot to head north a few months back, and a lone sambo. The pleasing catch for mine, however, were the dozen bream we caught in the process. The bream have noticeably moved down to the mouth of the system ready for spawning. While they are stackedup in this state they are easier to catch and some thumper fish over 45cms can be caught. While we didn’t land any in that class we did catch a few fish over the magic 1kg mark. I got dusted up by a few bigger fish though.
The best producing lure was once again the Squidgy Pro Fish in either Grasshopper or Flash Prawn mated to either a 5g, 6g or 9g Squidgy round jighead. We toggled between these sizes depending on the tenacity of the wind. When conditions died down and we could scale down our jigheads there was a noticeable increase in bream bites. As is customary, it didn’t matter what jighead we tied on for flatties.
I did change tact through the day to a 3″ Atomic Jerk Minnow mated to a 1/6oz Nitro jighead. I found this to be a great all round presentation for both flathead and bream with a slight emphasis on catching more bream.
To finish off the session we headed back up river towards Mooney Mooney to see if we could snare a last minute jewie to cap off a memorable session. While the jew didn’t supply the proverbial cherry on top, seven additional flathead did. It was great to see Graeme catch four fish in four casts at the death to help confirm in his mind that the Hawkesbury is very much alive and kicking.
