Oh what a Sunday! by Wayne Dubois

As enjoyable as it is, fishing can be a funny thing at times. You can plan a trip for months, right down to the finest of details, do all the research and testing you can, and then struggle to catch a fish when the trip finally comes along. Or the complete opposite can happen, and at the spur of the moment you decide to go for a flick just see what happens and land a fish of a lifetime.

That is exactly what happened to me one lazy Sunday, when after a big sleep in and a potter around the yard I realised I pretty much had nothing else to do. Consequently, we decided to load up the boat and head over to Blowering Dam for a few hours' fishing. Normally we like to put a big day in on Blowering, starting early and finishing late, and on Sundays I normally fly fish for trout in streams and rivers much closer to home, but for some reason we decided we'd head out for a golden perch fix.

The sun was shining, there was hardly a cloud in the sky, very little wind, and it was just about the middle of the day by the time we hit the water.

As we were targeting golden perch, our lures of choice were 60mm lipless crankbaits, in particular my own Insanity Tackle Slap Walkers. As we were heading to the bay I wanted to fish, I noticed another bay that was just screaming at me to go and fish it, so I veered off and decided to give it half an hour before we went up to my first intended spot.

It wasn't long before we realised we had made the right choice, as my partner Sharon continued to get follow after follow and hit after hit, but unfortunately dropped 2 fish in the process. In the 10 minutes we had fished, we saw a lot of action, so we continued to fish on.

Another 10 minutes later we had fished the whole bay without landing a fish, but we could see another fishy looking bay around the long, shallow north-facing point. Rather than power the required 200m, we decided we would use our electric motor to cruise around and quickly fish the bank as we went.

We didn't see any fish for the first 150m of featureless bank, and we were just starting to pick up extra speed with the 'lecky' when I noticed a monster fish sitting on the sandy bottom in about 7' of water. Even though I'd seen countless monster cod sitting or cruising the shallows of Blowering before, it happens to me every time and like a kid that just had his first lolly, I couldn't contain myself. I squealed to Shaz, "Look at the size of that cod -- it must be 120cm at least. Quick, cast at it before it sees us!"

Sharon obligingly put a cast in that wasn't quite on the mark and the fish didn't notice the lure, so I chucked a quick cast in that landed about 5m away. As the lure started to sink, I noticed the big cod head straight towards it and then right over the top. Unfortunately, the fish was facing away from me and was over the lure, so I didn't know if it had eaten it or not, but as I was just thinking about winding in, the rod started to load up and I could see the fish powering off with my Slap Walker hanging out the side of its mouth.