Cod adventures

MURRAY cod are beautiful fish. I’ve recently been on a couple of trips into New England cod country, in northern NSW, and fishing in the granite country has been quite inspiring. While I’m yet to catch a big cod, I’ve certainly had a taste of what the cod fishing experience in the ranges of New England is all about. This is some of the most beautiful and rugged gorge country in Australia. Like many types of fishing, the journey is as attractive as the fishing.
You have to be half goat to negotiate some of the steeper sections of granite that separate many of the pools.

We also had a quick trip to Pindari Dam near Ashford in northwest NSW where we fished from my tinny. This dam was very pretty and quite productive, despite the current low water levels. It holds good populations of both yellowbelly and Murray cod and is stocked on a regular basis. Its steep gorges and giant boulders in the upper reaches are quite different to most of the Queensland dams I’ve fished.

Prior to these trips I read a bit about techniques to use, what lures cod like and all the usual things keen anglers do when they are fishing for a species they haven’t encountered before. While this helped, it didn’t really prepare me for what an interesting type of fishing lure casting for cod is. These highly predatory animals are masters of their domains, and even the little ones have huge mouths and big appetites. I reckon that any creature that falls in the water is fair game if a cod can fit it in their capacious mouths.

I’ve caught a lot of fish on surface lures, but I reckon the bites from cod on the top are right up there in the excitement stakes. The ones I caught followed the lure almost to my feet and on a black night I’d recommend taking a change of pants. It is like a massive slurp that could suck in a duck. The big Taylor Made surface walker
I was using was sucked down by little tackers barely larger than it, with a few medium sized fish over 60cm long also getting involved. The bite is magnificent. When it comes to "bite music", these things are the Pavarotti of fish (with a very similar body shape as well!)

I learnt a lot in my early cod trips, mostly from talking to locals and slowly getting a better understanding of these beautiful mottled green fish. In Pindari Dam we were fishing with very little information. I don’t mind that at all; it forces you to try and work harder from first principles. I bought a few Bassman spinner baits and Mumblers prior to our trip and we used these extensively in the dam. Although we only caught six reasonable cod in more than a day’s fishing, I enjoyed fishing around the steep granite cliffs and boulders in the upper reaches of the dam. The landscape was a distinct contrast to the barra and bass dams of southern Queensland, with very steep and deep walls dropping straight into more than 30m of water in many parts of the dam. The extensive sunken timber was challenging to fish.

From my very limited experience with cod on spinnerbaits and hard-bodied lures, it seems that a slow and steady retrieve gets the most bites. Cod aren’t the fastest thing with fins, and they seem to prefer to deliberately line up their prey and stalk it before sucking it down with their enormous mouth. Most anglers who use spinnerbaits for cod prefer to use round Colorado blades and work the lure extremely slowly with the blades only just turning and the lure running deeply.

It also seems that cod like their lures with a lot of "bling". One very popular cod lure is the Mumbler by Bassman. This lure is the ultimate in "fish bling". It has a big Bozo soft plastic, skirts, and a nice shiny vibrating blade. These lures are a very flashy looking thing and swim a bit like a hard-bodied minnow.

In the rocky river pools we fished the cod were most active at night, and on that trip five anglers caught more than 50 cod over an evening and predawn session. These were smallish fish in the main with a few around 70cm in length caught and a couple of bigger ones lost. I felt very privileged to be invited on that trip, and I’m certainly not mentioning any names or places. What really impressed me greatly was the reverence with which this group of anglers treated these great fish. They were handled extremely carefully and gently released back into their beautiful flowing boulder filled pools. The anglers took great care to look after the fish at all times. It was distressing to all to see the remnants of set lines in some of the bigger pools.

Everywhere I fished for cod, there were goats watching me. On the dam or up the river there were herds of multi coloured goats that ran up and down the granite ravines on perilous looking smooth steep slopes of rock. In the granite country there are goats in profusion. The country itself is hard and steep but has a beauty to it that adds to the fishing experience. If you are able to access any granite country rivers you’ll need to be reasonably fit and prepared to walk up and down steep country for many kilometres to get to the good pools. Additionally, a shower of rain turns all the granite faces into extremely dangerous slippery slopes that you can only crawl across at best. This can make fishing quite dangerous, and it isn’t the type of country where you can easily get out of if you are injured.

While my cod experience is very limited, there’s an attraction there that will definitely keep me coming back for more. I’d love to catch a decent one, but the country and the cod make a fishing trip to the New England area a very attractive option even when the big ones refuse to play ball.