When the bad weather refuses to budge, Sammy Hitzke's solution is simple: drive away from it. With Brisbane sitting under days of rain, howling wind and unfishable swell, the South-East Queensland angler packed the car late one afternoon, pointed it down the highway and rolled into a southern cabin around 9 pm in search of fishable rocks the next morning.
"The weather has been absolutely horrendous here in Brisbane," he said. "Shocking. It's been raining, cranking wind, big swells, zero fishing opportunities as far as I'm concerned. So when that's the case, you go somewhere else."
The destination was a luderick rock that had already humbled him on a family weekend a few weeks earlier — when his mate Drewy stood next to him and went "10 to 2" before Sammy was left to scratch out a couple of late drifts on his own. The return trip was straight redemption.
First job on dawn rocks was bait. Sammy walked the wash line collecting cabbage weed, mossy weed and bullweed off submerged rocks. Each weed type behaves differently in the drift, and luderick — known up and down the New South Wales coast as drummer's quieter cousin — switch onto whichever the local fish are zoned in on at the time. Sammy's rule on a strange rock is to follow the locals. "I follow the local guys," he said. "They seem to know what they're doing really, really well."
He also broke the cardinal rule of weed-only purists by sneaking a tailor rod into the rock kit. A few casts of a popper drew nothing, but the bait was flicking on the surface and a Ghost Minnow on the second swap was crunched on the wind side of a wash hole. "Not a big chopper," he said, "but for a luderick session, that is a really, really nice fish."
With the chopper iced, Sammy switched to the luderick outfit — a Snyderglass 11ft 4in noodle rod with an Alvey centrepin, ten-pound fluoro down to the size-six Mustad 540 hook, twenty-pound lead-line above and twenty-pound braid above that to float the float high. The light tippet at the bottom is intentional. "If you're going to get snagged, it will be with the hook," he said. "Rather than potentially losing your float and your whole rig, you have your light bit down there. You hook the bottom, pop that off, you've still got your lead line and you've still got your float."
The drifts went exactly as the centre-pin crowd would draw them up. The first decent take dropped on the surface as a school fish hit the kelp. The second was a clean hook-up to a dark-flanked luderick that bored hard for the weed and lost. From there Sammy worked five into the wading bag while the rain came in sideways, dropping at least half a dozen others on the lift. "Got five," he said at the end. "Dropped a heap more and got absolutely soaked. Yeah, that was an experience."
The more honest highlight reel was Drew's. In the side-by-side replay tagged onto the back of the session, Drewy turned up to the same wash with bullweed and put on what Sammy openly called a clinic. "I don't need to tell you about Drew," Sammy said. "He's on again. Bit of a common theme occurring here. Do they not like cabbage that much, or is it just poor angling?"
Drew's reply: "No, I don't like cabbage." In the highlight reel, Drew finished the day at 10 luderick to Sammy's two — and the redemption trip became, by Sammy's own count, a second loss on points to a mate who simply had the right weed and the right drift.
Sammy's parting note was practical: rock-hop with grippy boots and dress light enough to swim out. Big swell, wind and rain are exactly the conditions that switch luderick on, and the fish that night were on cabbage and bullweed in close — but not on a fizzer.