For all his talk of going big, it was the smallest lure in Robbie Fishing's bag that did the damage. The Australian angler had loaded up with oversized swimbaits, jointed wake baits and an Aussie Crawler for an afternoon Murray cod mission, adopting a blunt motto for the day: go big or go home. Yet when the fish came, every one of them ate a Blue Dog diver, the compact hardbody he had described at the outset as "the smallest lure that I've brought with me today."
The trip was as much about discovery as catching. Robbie and his mate Sunny walked roughly a kilometre down a creek that ran off the main river, with no guarantee anything lived in it. The going was slow, past carpy lagoons and grass flattened by kangaroos or deer, on a mild May afternoon hovering around 21 degrees. The uncertainty did not bother him. "I love an adventure. I love exploring and discovering new places," he said. "This is how you find spots. There's a risk that there could have been nothing here."
The risk paid off on the first cast. A Murray cod ate deep in the roots and rubbed Robbie's line before it gave away its presence with a kick. "I told you they'd be in here," he said. A second cod followed within minutes, then a golden perch he estimated at the mid-40-centimetre mark. "That's three fish in four casts," he said. The whole burst, by his reckoning, lasted about three minutes, the reward for three hours of walking and exploring. "We fished for three hours, we caught three fish, and we got them all in about three minutes. How freaky is that?"
The lesson was not lost on him. Despite the big-bait theme, the surface lures drew nothing, and the modest Blue Dog diver accounted for the lot. "Bigger lures catch bigger fish, and little ones, too," he said.
Every fish was released, a decision Robbie felt the need to justify after past viewers questioned him for letting good eating fish go. The reasoning was practical: he was hours from the car, the day was still around 20 degrees, and he had no ice. Keeping a fish in those conditions, he said, "just doesn't sit well with me." Parked nearby with an Esky, he conceded, the golden perch would have been "the perfect eating size" and a keeper.
He even put some of the luck down to his shirt, a battered, hole-riddled favourite he keeps threatening to throw out because it seems to produce fish every time he wears it. After this session, the bin could wait. "I reckon it's still got a couple more fishing trips in it," he said.
More than a highlight reel, the trip was a case study in how land-based native anglers find new water: read the map, pick a likely creek, walk in, and back the odds. "Where there's one, there should be more," Robbie said, and on this stretch the maths held up.