Clarence river, Rocky Mouth

Author: josh

Category: Trip Reports

Created on Monday, 05 December 2011 06:59

Written by Josh

Bass, bream & flatties, all caught on a solitary 7cm Rapala Countdown sinking lure

I launched my kayak outrigger style into the Clarence river at Maclean yesterday, making a beeline for Rocky Mouth where I could see birds working the surface. The water was murkier than expected, most likely due to heavy rains further upstream. It's conditions like these that bring bass down from the upper reaches and I suspected I might encounter some today. Intuition served me well because in the next couple of hours I caught and released 3 of them, along with 3 bream and 3 flatties (the target species) as well. Every single one of them was caught on a single Rapala 7cm Countdown Sinking lure, almost all of them hooked while slow trolling.

I'd packed no shortage of lures and two rods, though one of those rods suffered a major tangle early in the trip so it wasn't long before I was down to one. I considered heading back home for a moment to grab another rod but instead resigned myself to just the one. And when the Countdown started hooking fish one after the other I really didn't have much reason to tie on anything else. I was almost surprised how effective trolling a lure turned out to be because there was no shortage of food for the fish and birds, all of them converging upon a mass of small prawns. Then again, I should know by now... fish just can't go past Countdowns!