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Tweed cleans up and the fishing fires
  |  First Published: July 2015



I’ve been whingeing and moaning about the condition of the water and how bad the river has been fishing lately. Just recently though, a group of keen fisho mates got together for a private bream comp. I was feeling pretty confident of a top 2 finish as there were only 2 boats in it with 3 on each boat, however, there was a bit of contention about the rules.

I thought it was just like the ABT — the 5 biggest fish win — but we’ll talk more about that later. The other boat headed to the seaway, while we stopped at the Blue Hole. We used the same team technique all day — 1 person with a 1/40oz hidden weight jighead with a Z-Man tied on, as with this lure we could gently float it down the rocks, tempting fish to strike it on the drop. The next person had a 1/8oz jighead, same lure, but with the extra weight. We dead stick this lure on the bottom pretty much where the sand and rocks meet, while the third person had a deep diving hardbody to run across the rocks.

We started catching fish pretty much straight away on all the lures. Mind you, the first thing I noticed was the bream were spawning, and second they were all a nice size so we’d take a photo of them on the ruler and release them back into the river.

We left the Blue Hole and headed to Morgo’s Wall — the rock wall going from the caravan park at Chinderah right down to where the pub is. Here I experienced the best bream session ever. We found the heavy 1/8oz jig was working the best, but gee at 1 stage we had a couple of triple hookups — just crazy stuff. We were sure we’d beaten our mates, but there was just as much yelling and screaming from their boat as ours, so they had to be getting into them too. I kept looking in our live well, as I’d not seen a bag, well not 1 that I’ve been involved in, that big. Our smallest was 33cm to the fork, the biggest 37 — now that’s pretty rare on the Tweed.

When we got back to Kennedy Drive, the boys pointed out there was a change in the rules and it was whoever had the most in the live well would win. Say what? We’d kept 5, but they had over 20. They swore that they’d yelled the new rules out over the water. I looked at my teammates who were laughing so much. All good fun, though the best was letting these big fish go in front of a lot of astonished people…

“Why are you letting them go?” they asked. One old fella offered me a fiver for a fish, so I gave him 2 for nothing.

The river is in great shape and the fishing’s the best I’ve seen, with the walls working well for tailor and bream. I’m also catching trevs, whiting, and some nice size flathead are starting to show in the upper reaches. All these fish were caught on Z-Man and Diztek shallow divers, so get out there and get into ’em.

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