Robbie Fishing has put together one of the more telling native-fish snapshots of the season - a quiet day on a private creek he last fished a decade ago, where he had set up for trout and redfin and instead landed at least five Murray cod on 4 lb monofilament.
"Today I'm just a little bit excited because I'm fishing in a spot that I used to love fishing, but I haven't been to for about 10 years," he says at the top of the video. The farmer who let him on the property was managing his expectations. "The farmer that let me in tells me that all he ever sees in the creek now are carp."
The first cod ate a worm rig before Robbie had even seated his rod in the holder. "That all happened very, very quickly," he says, working the small fish off the hook in the water without lifting it clear. The second hit was minutes later, on the same drift. "That's another cod. This is the new cod hole. New cod creek. This is cod central."
A third cod arrived while he was distracted, having a chat with the farmer up on the bank. By the time the session wound up, Robbie had logged at least five Murray cod, plus a couple of carp, every fish coming on a worm rig and 4 lb line.
The biggest surprise came not from the angler but the landowner. "I was just talking to the farmer, and even he's surprised," Robbie says. "He didn't know there was cod here. He lives, like, 50 m behind me, and he's lived there all his life, and he didn't even know that there was Murray cod in the creek. He does now, because I've caught them in front of him."
The footage will resonate with anglers tracking a slow but increasingly visible recovery in Murray cod numbers across inland New South Wales and Victoria. Hatchery stockings, closed seasons during spawn and tighter size and bag limits have shifted the picture on plenty of waterways previously written off as carp-only. Robbie's session suggests that recovery now extends to small private creeks that have not seen serious fishing pressure in years.
His tackle choice was, by his own admission, completely wrong for the fish he ended up catching - and it almost did not matter. "The reason I'm using really light line, in case you're wondering, is because I came up here hoping to catch a redfin or a blackfish," he says while bowed up on a cod that bottomed his weepy rod. "There's not one line fits all when you've got blackfish that are so small and carp that are so big." By the end of the day, even he was prepared to call it before the fish hit the surface. "It's a cod. And quite a nice one at that."
His sign-off doubled as a low-key conservation note. "It's amazing just how much the fishing has changed here in this creek over the last 10 years," Robbie says. "It's basically infested with Murray cod. I'm not going to say that's a bad thing."