Swimbaiting Murray cod by Adam Townsend

When it comes to Murray cod fishing, you don't have to be an expert to go out and catch a cod. You just tie on a lure, cast and wind a few times and eventually get a fish, right?
If only it were that easy. A lot goes into catching cod, but the most important thing is appearance. Murray cod aren't the kind of fish you can go out and catch everyday. Sometimes it can be up to four days straight, even a week before you find one on the end of your line. Along with spending a lot of time on the water, lure choice also plays a big part.
One of the biggest things I've learnt over the years when fishing for Australian natives is the way they bite. There are two types of bite - a reaction bite and a finesse bite. On any good day, you could get lucky and end up with 30 or so cod on a reaction bite, as they actively look to hunt at that time. On really slow days when you aren't finding fish, you'll have to try a more finesse style of fishing to get that bite.
Fish smarter not harder - 100 slow casts can make all the difference in finding the bite, compared to 1000 quick casts. This is where I turn to my confidence lure, the Westin Swim Swimbait. This lure comes in a range of sizes from 65mm, 100mm and my favourite the 120mm, all with different weight and depth preferences to cover most styles of fishing.
Swimbaits have recently become very popular for many reasons - they're easy to work during the retrieve and are successful on most retrieve techniques, they're more versatile than most other lure types making them easier to fish in a wider variety of conditions, and they're more life-like than most other lures with more natural swimming movements. They also come in multiple sizes, weights, suspending and intermediate models that can keep them in the strike-zone longer.
This gets me up to one of my most frequently asked questions, "What is the best depth to be fishing when throwing swimbaits for cod?"