Two mornings, the same lake, wildly different results. That was the story of a recent back-to-back winter session on Lake Macquarie by Newcastle charter operator Lowey, who runs guided trips on the system, and it ended up being as much about reading conditions as catching fish.
Day one dawned freezing and calm, the day after a full moon, a combination that often makes for tough fishing once the sun is up. So it proved. After landing an early squid on a jig, Lowey ground through a slow morning, picking off a handful of flathead and a stray tailor on soft plastic prawns and vibes, but admitted the bite never really fired. The chopper tailor were a constant nuisance, slicing through leaders and forcing endless re-ties, the part of the job he likes least. By midday, with the sun high and the bait scattered, he pulled the pin to regroup for the morning.
The second morning looked worse on paper. A forecast of light wind turned into a freezing north-westerly gusting to 35 or 40 knots, conditions that make holding the boat and feeling bites genuinely hard. Forced off his usual ground and into the only sheltered corner he could find, somewhere he would not normally bother fishing, Lowey hooked a jewfish on his first cast on a five-inch soft plastic shrimp.
That set the tone. Despite the wind, the session turned into one of those rare purple patches, three quality flathead in barely a handful of casts at one spot, including a couple of dark, fat fish pushing close to 70 centimetres, plus a second jewfish and more squid. The contrast with the grind of the day before was not lost on him.
For Lowey, the takeaway was about persistence and flexibility rather than any secret lure. "Don't let a bit of wind stop you. Get out there and still have a crack," he said, pointing out that the productive spot was one he only fished because it offered shelter, not because he expected fish there. "Sometimes you have good plans and they don't work out, and you go somewhere else because that's your only option, and it works out really, really good."
He was equally blunt about what the camera does not show. The non-stop second morning, he warned, is not how fishing usually looks: "Look at the first part of this video yesterday. Absolute grind."
The other lesson was about movement. On a system like Lake Macquarie, he explained, the fish follow the bait and rarely sit still, so a spot that fires one day can be empty the next. "Everything moves around, follows the bait, so you've got to stay on top of it," he said. He kept most of his fish, releasing the big breeding flathead and keeping only a couple of eating-size models for the table.
It was, in his words, a session with a bit of everything: slow fishing and great fishing, nice weather and horrible weather, and proof that the worst forecast can still hand up the best fish if you are willing to adapt and keep casting.