Skinny Water Goodness

Written by Josh Pearson

Spent all Friday at work going over Nearmap in search for a local skinny creek that might hold bass. Ended up finding one relatively close to home and it had nice access in the lower reach.

We were on the water at about 5 and started heading up from the launch tossing Tiemco Soft Shell Cicada’s in the dark, unbeknownst to us we were there right on high tide which made the paddle up a lot easier, not much in the way of action in the lower reaches but this was to be expected this close to the salt, we raised a couple of bream strikes but overall it was very quiet.

Decided to start pushing up the creek once the sky started to lighten, saw some awesome rock overhanging structure that screamed fish but no love.

It wasn’t until we reached the first rock bar that Dre got the first fish for the day, a very dark bass around 150-200mm. Great sign I was thinking as we navigated our way through the rocks, didn’t have to get out due to the high water, it wasn’t until later that we found out just how much water comes up! So we got through and this was as far as the yaks could go, tied them off to some bankside structure and fished the “pools” around the yaks. Dre fished the upstream pool and picked one up straight away, another 150-200 black as. I fished the pool we had just come through, a body of water maybe 6-7m long and 2m wide, using the betts I came up tight with one of the better fish of the day, no measure but high 20’s I’d say and just as satisfying as a 400 for me

After getting a couple more hits from this pool Iwe decided to suss out what upstream looked like, leaving the yaks unattended for a little while we made our way up through the big boulders and found some beautiful looking water.

It didn’t take long before we were onto the bass again, such beautiful fish and so dark you could almost call them black!

Pulled 3 or 4 from this pool then headed back down to grab the paddles and gear (so that the yaks couldn’t be paddled at least if there were scumbags around). While there we decided to throw past the rock again to see if there were more in there, again we were rewarded with some beautiful fish, biggest was Dre’s and there were definitely more holding up in there!

All in all we pulled 7 fish from this tiny pool! All beautifully coloured.

So we hiked upstream further coming across some awesome pools, I decided to have some fun and tied on a little Smith Bisen cicada lure before stealthily creeping up to this pool. First cast and the cicada was slurped off the surface by this little fella

I saw a nice snag in the water but couldn’t get a cast from where I was, I climbed up round to a break in the bankside vegetation and put a cast right on the edge of the snag, twitching a couple of times thinking, “there has to be a bass on there!”, I wasn’t disappointed with a great hit coming about 1.5m out from the snag, put up a great tussle and we had a double hook up moment with Dre pulling one smaller from the same snag!

It got to be pretty hard yakka after this point and the fishing slowed right down, we were about 5 pools up before the hits stopped and we decided to call it and head back to the yaks.

It soon became apparent the amount of water that had vacated the creek…. It was an interesting experience trying to navigate the yak through boulders that were covered in the slipperiest moss ever but we eventually made it through, the creek had dropped so much in the lower reaches that we had to drag a fair bit across the sand to get into the deeper channels.

We were very lucky as we had no idea about this creek prior to paddling it but lesson learnt about the tides! Apologies for the photos as I left my camera at home and had to rely on my iPhone, many bass released with no photo, it was truly a privilege to pull fish from this skinny water and look forward to getting up there again once the insects start up

Thanks for reading!