Fishing in Texas - QLD!
The first shooting trip for our new 2010 series was a bit of an unknown. Organised by the boys from Wilson Fishing, we were to turn up in Brisbane on one February morning, pick up our Mitsubishi Challenger and then follow our so called guides to a secret river for a spot of Murray Cod fishing.
Murray Cod are a funny fish but they rarely make you laugh. We’ve tried a few times in the past to film Australia’s premier native freshwater sportsfish – most times they turn out to be very long days indeed.
Like all native fish in this country, if the conditions are not right, if the barometer or the moon or the water temperature are not spot on (no one actually knows what is spot on!) they simply won’t feed. You can cast every lure ever made at them, but they simply will not strike. Often when you throw in a camera crew, they become even less hungry!
Our drive from Brisbane took around 4 hours. We headed to Texas. Up until this trip I didn’t even know there was a Texas in Australia. It’s right on the border of NSW and Queensland and sits on the other side of the Great Dividing Range. It was a comfortable trip in the Challenger, we enjoyed the extra room in the back to soak up all our camera and fishing gear.
We arrived in the evening and the weather was muggy. Rain was threatening and the forecast didn’t look great. A low barometer is the worst for Cod, so it’s fair to say the whole crew was a little skeptical about our chances!
Our host for the next day or so was former rodeo champ Alex Campbell – his property near Bonshaw is surrounded by a few rivers, including one called the Seven. In the height of summer there wasn’t much flow, but still plenty of water in the pools.
We woke up very early the next morning, a bit too early. The plan was to get on the water just a bit after sun up. So we were woken up at 4.30am. By the time we had breakfast, coffee and talked up the day it was well after sun up that we actually left the house!
So at around 8am we finally launched our little boats on a 4 kilometer stretch of river. The rain held off and in fact the sun was out. We slowly made up way up the river, powered by little electric motors, the first kilometer or so was very weedy, but then we came to some deeper water and sure enough we started catching fish!
First, our so called support boat hooked up. They weren’t meant to be fishing, just helping our camera boat out, but Scotty from Wilson Tackle managed a few casts and hooked up a lovely Murray Cod. We certainly made sure he knew he shouldn’t be fishing, but couldn’t help but admire his very handsome looking fish.
Murray Cod are not something we catch often, but every time you see one you remember just how handsome they really are!
Luckily for our support boat, we followed soon afterwards and managed a few nice cod and a lone Yellowbelly. All going well for our first episode…
After lunch and after we’d fished all the fishable water we decided to drive to another close by spot and fish off the shore.
Again, the cod were on the chew, we were just spinning with spinner baits and hard bodied lures, off the bank and the few fish that took our lures made sure we finished off the show in style!
But I guess the lasting memory from fishing in Texas was walking around the banks of the Seven River generally fearing for my life. We saw two black snakes, Alex told us the big Brown Snakes are the aggressive ones and there’s heaps of them about and here we were walking along an overgrown shore in thongs! Next time we return to the inland cod waters on the NSW/QLD border, we will take boots and some sort of snake proof pant!
