Sunday, November 27, 2011

A day of Cod and Flathead - Causeway Lake, CQ

Guest contributor, and Sebile fan, Clayton Nichols talks us through avoiding snags, finding flathead and one of his favourite spots in Central Queensland.

First fish of the day

Bussing down to the sort of local estuary system is a very slow journey but when I got there it was almost low tide, perfect for big cod and nice flathead. My first throw of a placcie landed me a small cod, but they slowly got bigger, all of this in the first few casts in my opinion is a pretty dam good start and landing a fish on the first cast is a great confidence builder for any angler, even a pro.

I changed to one of my favourite lures for fishing the snags, a Sebile Crankster 35Mr, the square shaped bib just bounces over the snags leaving the hooks dangling freely for any cod or flathead sitting next to it which ends in a perfect hook up. This is exactly what my holo greenie coloured Crankster did.


My Big Cod

Every time I cast out there was an eighty percent chance of some nice sized cod, the other twenty precent was flathead and strangely enough moses perch, which my lure hardly appreciated, all three of my holo greenie Cranksters now need new paint jobs thanks to these toothy critters. 
Representing Sebile

The tide started to come back in, slowly covering a yabbie flat and in that water were many small whiting, I had my stradic ci4 1000 reel and my okuma xfactor 1-3kg rod. On my stradic was 6 pound braid, on that 4 pound fluoro leader connected by a surgeon knot. Then tide to the 4 pound fluoro was a Sebile splasher 52. This  perfectly balanced set up enabled me to cast all the way over and float the lure just above the nosey fish keen to forage for anything on the yabbie flat, one little bloop and straight on the lure went a nice blue nosed sand whiting. As fun as this was it only lasted a good 15 minutes before the flat was covered with water.

Flatty attack

Because my mate and I fish here so often we know where all the rocks on the flat are, and next to those rocks are flathead, how do we know that, on a low tide walk around the estuary and you will find flathead holes, like stingray holes but where the flathead lay, waiting to prey on an unsuspecting fish. 

Before I walked over to that side I had a final cast with the Crankster producing a nice kilo and a bit cod, then on the other side, the flathead cam on the chew, with that concluded a very successful day.
Words and pics: Clayton Nicolls. You can read more from Clatyon at his blog.

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