After weeks of cold, wet Victorian winter, Mitchy made the punt east to East Gippsland on a clear weather window and stitched together about a dozen estuary perch on a Lucky Craft Flash Minnow in 1.2 metres of water — including one chunky fish in the high-40 cm class that crunched the lure on a pause and bored straight back into the timber.
"Today I've sort of made the boot up the coast into East Gippsland and I haven't been up here for quite some time," he said at the launch. "I'll be looking around the bottom section of the system, near the front, looking for whatever — bream, perch, maybe the odd flatty."
The shallow flat he picked sat in 1.3 metres on the sounder, with a gentle drop-off about eight to ten metres from the bank. The first cast with a Flash Minnow in Ghost Sayori — a small, hard-bodied jerkbait that dives a fraction under the surface — drew a hit on the fifth or sixth cast. "That's a fish. Didn't take long," he said. "What's that, five casts in?"
The pattern set up early. Mitchy worked the lure with sharp, erratic twitches and let it sit dead for two or three seconds between bursts. Almost every bite came on the pause. "Just twitching that lure pretty erratically and then a pause," he said. "And then a pause is the key."
With the Flash Minnow only diving so far, he swapped on a Z-Man Baby Shad in his go-to peacock-bass colour to reach the slightly deeper fish hanging just off the drop. The first cast pinned a perch "good" inside the cheek; the second drift got cleaned up on the pause when something bigger hit and broke him off, even on 10 lb fluoro. "Even ten-pound FC rock on fish like this, they can go through it like a hot knife in butter," he said. "Those gill rakers are super sharp."
The fish that mattered came an hour or so in, after the school of mid-30 cm perch had thinned out. Mitchy was casting up and along the line where the side imaging was lighting up, dropped a Flash Minnow back in and felt a fish move serious water on the pause. "He boiled up. I'm just going easy now. Back the drag off," he said as the fish nosed for the snag. "Yeah, he's a good one. He's a real good fish."
The perch netted at what Mitchy called mid-to-high 40s, possibly 48 cm. "He is fat. Look at the guts on him," he said. "Just been going through those little fish, those mid-30s sort of size fish, and then this one come along and clunked the Flash Minnow." The hook-up — one treble buried cleanly in the corner of the jaw — was the scenario the soft-twitch retrieve is designed to produce.
The storm-window arithmetic ended the session on plan. "Wind's picking up now. Later on today it's supposed to thunderstorm and we're getting 15 to 20 mil of rain," he said. "That's why I've shot out of here now because it's probably going to be the last chance we'll get for a week or so."
The takeaways from a two-and-a-half-hour Vic session in winter conditions were straightforward. Match the lure to the depth — a shallow Flash Minnow over the very edge, a Baby Shad along the drop. Cast up the line where the sounder is showing fish rather than at the bank. And on the pause, stay still: the bigger fish in this system clearly responded to dead lure in deeper water, not to constant action.