Ragnar

Hey guys, I’m starting to do some research on the Manning River, aiming to target bass in the upper reaches. If anyone is willing to pass on any info/knowledge of the area please send us a DM to chat about it. I’m not after secret spots or anything like that, mainly just after info on land based access points, what potential food sources that they will target which will influence lure selection, or if there is anything else I need to take into consideration when fishing up there. Cheers!

@jenno64 cheers mate! Yea definitely be back there very soon 😉

Yea! A good one to tick off the bucket list haha

With the full moon last night and a well timed high tide change I thought I would give glidebaiting for Jew a crack. I tied on what I think is a very under rated lure, the Savage gear 3D glide swimmer. The action on these things is insane, with a sharp turn of the reel it gets a massive glide, and they are a slow sink which gives you the option to fish the entire water column depending on how long you want to pause between glides. And they are cheap when it comes to glidebaits! I picked a few of them up from the bargain bin at my local boating, camping and fishing store for $10 a pop! Hardware is pretty solid straight out of the packet so no real need to upgrade. When I arrived at spot X I was a little apprehensive as the water colour was very discoloured with little to no visibility due to recent rain. Which played a part in the colour lure I chose, being the white glow. Casting up current and bringing it down with the current to provide the most natural presentation, 3 quick sharp turns of the reel and pause… rinse and repeat. I was only pausing 3-5 seconds targeting the top 1-2m of the water column. After around 10 minutes of working the area my lure was belted.

@Little_Flatty yea I’ve heard the same thing. I’ve caught a couple of soapies in the same area land based so I know they’re around there, but the ones I heard boofing sounded a bit bigger than a soapy!

After cracking my pb bass a few weeks ago I was keen to get the boat on the river to access a spot that I heard and saw multiple big fish boofing baitfish and prawns off the surface that was just out of reach from the land. And I wasn’t disappointed, with a very healthy 48cm EP cracking my Shimano Bantam Jijil 115 off the top! The amount of bait around needed to be seen to be believed, which I feel made it hard for our lures to even be noticed by the dozens of big fish that were working the area! Judging by some of the bow waves being pushed through the bait schools, I’m almost certain some were decent jewfish!

@Subtropic that’s wild, I know that river is renowned for big bass!!!

@big Neil thanks mate. I might spend some time to really nut out some other spots around where I picked this big girl up. I definitely think there are other opportunities for that class of fish in the system. Might have to take the boat out and do some exploring!

@Yowie thanks mate! Yea I’ve had some funny nights out chasing them! From cracking cricket scores to getting mates and my missus on to their first top water bass has been special! I can’t wait til my kids are a little bit older and I can take them out to experience it with them as well!

@Ganguddy Goodoo I’d like to try some of the small back waters down the south coast, but I’m too far away these days. Maybe one day I’ll get back down there. I think if I was to travel to specifically chase Bass I would go north. Mid-Northern NSW has some amazing river systems to chase the bigger models so that might be my next adventure! Yea the spawn run can be interesting haha people get very territorial on their spots along the rivers up there, not really my cup of tea. Id rather go to NZ and have a chance to catch a 30lb+ monster trout, which I was lucky enough to try on my honeymoon a few years ago haha but wasn’t able to get onto one that size. Did pull a 10lb hen brown though which was cool, saw a bloke land an 18lb rainbow. It was ridiculous!! To think they get double that size really blows me away!

@Subtropic cheers mate! It’s in Sydney, that’s all I’ll say lol If you have a look on the DPI website it lists lakes and rivers that have been stocked with what type and how many fish etc, so that should be a good starting point.

@Little_Flatty have a look at the second vid mate. The one I caught was 53cms, I was throwing 44cms models back in disappointment after lol but yea other methods like fly could be a possibility. @DerekD cheers mate, definitely one I’m proud of achieving! It will be very tough to beat, bigger ones are out there though, might just be another million casts til I cross paths with one!

Growing up in Canberra I was lucky enough to have access to some great native inhabited waters, being LBG, Murrumbidgee river, Googong and the mountain lakes Jindabyne and Eucumbene (although trout aren’t necessarily native, they seem to fall into that category), but I never had the opportunity to chase what I would now deem to be my favourite species, Bass. Since moving to Sydney, around 7 years ago, I have dedicated countless hours fishing through rain, hail or shine (if you count moon shine) chasing Bass, in particular on surface at night time. Starting in a local smaller residential lake, honing my technique until I had the place wired. I had a circuit of about half a dozen spots around the lake that I would work my way through, I found some produced more numbers and others produced a better class of fish but I could go there on any given night and I would rarely walk away without netting a fish or 2. I remember the first time I took one of my mates to this lake. I told him ‘see those lillipads right there’ maybe 15-20 metres off the bank. I said ‘put your cast within half a metre of them’. My mate made his cast and it landed perfectly within half a meter of the lillipads. The lure wasn’t in the water 10 seconds, then boom, he was on to his first bass. It was this little lake the sparked the surface addiction for me. Since then, me and my mate have fished countless locations, always seeking new ground and of course bigger fish! I’ll never forget this one magical session we had around 4-5 years ago at another lake. It was early Spring and we were lucky enough to time our session with a hatching of flying ants. We got to the lake that we were going to fish and I reckon every fish in that lake was smashing the surface. I have never seen anything in freshwater like it. We were using our tried and true lures for this spot, soft shell cicadas and what I would call my donut busting lure, the Taylor made Jimmy lizard. What we found though, is they were that focused on the smaller insects that we were struggling to get any hits. And this was so frustrating because we knew the fish were there, they were everywhere! My mate had just started tying his own flies and he had a couple in his tackle box. But the next problem we had was how are we going to cast these with spin gear. So we both tied on cicada lures and removed the back trebles and tied on another leader to the back point of the lure which we then tied these flies to. We then started picking up fish left right and centre. Mate even managed a double hook up, one on the cicada and one on the fly! When we were landing the fish we noticed their throats were absolutely full of these flying ants. The biggest fish that we landed, well, my mate landed haha was 42cm. And we were both so stocked to see one of that size. That will be a night I’ll never forget! Another night we fished this back creek, starting at our access point which was a bridge we managed to pick a few up and then we started to explore from there. Sneaking into paddocks and walking ages in the darkness finding new ground. We even got chased out of the paddock by horses in the pitch black darkness! That wasn’t fun Haha So we went down the other side of the bridge and climbed through waist deep grass to access this little spot where we had heard a big boof. We were fishing there for about 5-10 minutes and my mate screamed out, $H!t, a snake! I was jumping around looking at the ground going ‘WHERE, WHERE?!’ And he points to the tree next to him where there was a 2m+ diamond python sitting in wait for some unsuspecting possum to come walking past! We high tailed it out of there and left him to do his thing. I managed to pull my PB from another spot on the same creek not long after this, it went 39cm. Since then, I have researched and fished so many places within reasonable driving distance trying to find the most likely spot where I would come across a 40cm+ Bass. And I sort of stumbled onto what is now my new favourite spot about 2-3 months ago. The first time I fished it, I cracked the 40cm mark and upgraded my PB to 43cms. I was stoked!! I remember thinking, how long is it going to take me to break that. Was it going to be another 4 year slog, or have I finally found a magical Bass haven.?! This brings me to my last session there… Where I upgraded my PB to something I never thought that I could achieve. I will attach pics/vids below. Now this has created somewhat of a fishing philosophical conundrum for me. Where to now… Having caught a fish that I never thought was possible, knowing how much time and effort I dedicated, is beating it now insurmountable? How do I generate the motivation to fish for Bass where my fishing motivation comes from wanting to catch the next biggest fish….

My last 2 sessions on my local while they have been very productive, with over 20 soapies hitting the deck, they have left me with one question burning on my mind… Where are the big girls at.?!

Cheers mate, always hard to get a good pic when fishing solo! Haha

Maybe I’ll target bream next time and I might snag a jew as bycatch haha

So I went out last night for one of my weekly attempted jew sessions, and I say attempted because that’s all they seem to be for me! The elusive silver ghost has evaded my lures for longer than I care to remember or admit haha After landing 3 decent flattys ranging from 45-55cm, I came up tight to something that didn’t feel like a flatty. Considering I was throwing around a 4inch plastic and how far up in the water column it took my lure had me guessing what this thing could be. After it’s failed attempts to take me under the wharf I was fishing from, I managed to get it to the surface of the chocolate stained water, and saw the flash of chrome. Not the flash of chrome I was hoping to see that night when I set out but when I realised the size of it I knew it was a special fish! Going just over 42cm on the lie detector made it my new PB by a bit over 1cm! After a couple of pics she was back on her way to hopefully pass on her genes to the next generation!

@Mike Sydney yea mate the 7’6 XH. Nah no other bycatch. The spot I fish is an intertidal zone which is mostly out of the water at low tide and has less than 1m of water at high so not much else apart from bait fish will be up there. When you see a lay like that, it’s easy to see how an 18cm glidebait isn’t too big haha here’s the one I landed on it earlier this year.

@Mike Sydney I use the tatula swimbait rod matched with the tatula 200 baitcaster reel. Awesome set up, perfect for casting the bigger lures. I run 30lb braid and 30lb fluoro leader. That extra leader weight isn’t so much for fighting the fish, more so to save your back pocket if you birds nest, you won’t be busting off $50-60 lures! And trust me if you’re fishing at night and you bust a lure off, you’ll have slim chances finding it without ruining the whole flats wading around for it! And I don’t worry about using mono leader to add any extra buoyancy to the lures, they’re big enough that the leader isn’t really going to affect them. I only use mono leaders if I’m using smaller surface lures for bass, EPs etc where any little advantage you can get to keep the smaller lures on the surface is key.

Have you had any luck yet @Maniac? A lot of casts between fish with the big lures, I’m still looking for that 80+cm model on swimbait, I landed a 72cm earlier this year after dropping a much bigger one the session before. I went for a flats mission last night, had a couple of missed hits with the Jackall gantia. Shame the cloud cover spoiled the full moon! I think the key thing is to really work out a spot. Go there at low tide, even with no fishing gear and suss it out for lays, pay attention to which direction they’re facing, that will give you a good indication of what part of the tide they’re in the area (run in/run out). And fish the same area on that part of the tide. And also look for any weedbeds or drains that they might sit in around waiting to ambush! Doesn’t have to be much of a drain, even if it’s only an extra 10-15cm deeper than the area around it they will use that. If you’re wading around at night it really pays to stay as quite as you can when moving around. I had something belt some bait less than 2m from me last night, nearly filled my waders up that’s for sure haha Also talk to some locals in the area, you’ll be surprised what they might tell you! I bumped into this old bloke at this spot I fish, he had hand drawn mud maps of the mangrove areas and would go there at every low tide and document the size and number of lays in the area, I think he was writing a book on it. That morning he counted about half a dozen lays over 1m, could potentially only be the 1 fish moving spots during the tide phases, but knowing that is enough for me to drive the 1 hour there for a few hour session haha I actually took a photo of a one of the lays. That’s an 18cm Jackall gantia sitting next to it!

Thanks for the ID guys! Yea I wasn’t too keen on touching it when I saw all the spikes on it! Haha just saw it hanging on a pylon where I was fishing and I netted to to get a better look.

Hey guys, I was hoping someone on here could help ID a juvenile fish that I found while fishing a section of the Hawkesbury. It doesn’t look like a usual fish that would be found in the system and would be keen to know what it is! cheers