There's a particular kind of stubbornness that puts an angler in the car at 5 pm with a fishing trip already half a day behind schedule. Sammy Hitzke had it last week. With Brisbane locked under days of rain, big swell and wind, his answer was to drive south overnight, find a luderick rock that had previously embarrassed him, and try to put a wading-bag dent in it before the same weather caught up.
"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 rock he picked was the same one his mate Drewy had "absolutely kicked" him on a few weeks earlier. That session had finished 10 fish to two in Drew's favour, and Sammy was returning explicitly for redemption. He arrived at the cabin around 9 pm, racked rods overnight and was on the rocks at first light.
Bait came off the wash line. Cabbage weed, mossy weed and bullweed peeled off submerged rocks were dropped into a bait bucket, with Sammy noting that local fish often switch onto one over the others on any given day. He doesn't argue with locals. "I follow the local guys," he said. "They seem to know what they're doing really, really well."
A tailor rod went into the rock kit on principle. A few popper casts into a wash hole produced nothing, but baitfish were flicking on the surface and a Ghost Minnow on the second swap copped a clean smash. "Not a big chopper," Sammy said, "but for a luderick session, that is a really, really nice fish."
With the chopper iced, the luderick rig came out — a Snyderglass 11 ft 4 in noodle rod, an Alvey centrepin, ten-pound fluoro tippet, twenty-pound lead-line and twenty-pound braid above to float the float high. Sammy's rationale for keeping the bottom of the rig light was straightforward. "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 the way the noodle-rod brigade draws them up. The first proper take dropped on the surface as a school fish powered into kelp. The second buried clean and bored hard for the weed before being lifted, tail-walking, into the bag. Sammy worked his way to five luderick — and dropped, by his own count, a half-dozen more on the lift while the rain came down in a hard-flat sheet over the camera. "Got five," he said at the end. "Dropped a heap more and got absolutely soaked. Yeah, that was an experience."
The redemption arc, however, did not deliver. The post-script highlight reel attached to the video was Drewy's, and showed exactly the kind of clinic that had bothered Sammy a fortnight earlier. Drewy fished the same wash, on bullweed, and stacked fish back-to-back. Sammy's running joke became a question. "Bit of a common theme occurring here," he said. "Do they not like cabbage that much, or is it just poor angling?"
Drew's reply, deadpan: "No, I don't like cabbage."
The final score on the day was Drew at ten luderick, Sammy at two. The redemption trip was, in his own words, a second loss on points to a mate who simply had the right weed and the right drift on a wild rock.
Sammy's parting tips were practical: rock-hop in grippy boots, keep the kit light enough to swim out if the swell gets you, and watch the path back to the car when the water is low — it's never as easy returning when the water is high. Big swell, wind and overcast are exactly the conditions that switch luderick on, and on this day the fish were on cabbage and bullweed in close — but not on a fizzer.