There’s an old saying that hangs around the Dudds like a blowie around a dag – ‘sort it out later.’ There is a time however, when “sort it out later” becomes an issue, and that time is now.

It’s a fantastic saying, which suits the Dudds down to a T, as it basically means the group can operate without making decisions. Which is fine until a decision has to be made. And that’s when we find ourselves in situations like this. We’ve got two weeks until our annual trip is due, and no one has any idea where we’re going, when we’re going, who’s going and probably even why we’re going.

We reach a situation every few years where we hit a brick wall at our regular location. Generally we have a few very lean years trying to sort out where the submerged rocks and logs are at a particular location. After that we have about 15 minutes of really good fishing on the last day of that third year, followed by two years of crap fishing where we catch nothing and hit all the logs that we thought we had identified. The trouble we face is that the 15 minutes in the third year makes it hard to give the place up, because we know what it’s capable of. Bit like marriage really. Eventually, we get sick of getting nothing and we end up having to move on – but where to move on to?

We’ve done most of central Queensland, which is our venue of choice, so between the ones that won’t have us back and the ones that we don’t want to go to anymore because they’re duddholes, we’re almost out of options. So I guess I can’t say I was super surprised when Manboobs said he had a new destination in mind. What did surprise me was that he wanted to go back to Boondooma.

Boondooma was the scene of our first Dudd trips. And there was a period when we cleaned up on yellowbelly by dragging spinnerbaits across the weed beds. It was so successful that we did it for another five years, during which time we caught absolutely nothing. At the time, spinnerbaits were cutting edge, but lure design has moved on. There are now things that I am completely unfamiliar with like soft plastics, ice jigs, metal vibes, plastic jigs, ice plastics, soft ice vibes, metal plastics and other things that are completely confusing to someone like me who started fishing when the only artificials were Brisbane Bitter and VB.

But as Boobies says: we’re not doing any good on the coast, so maybe it’s time to go back to the future. I can’t work out whether he is serious or not. On the one hand, maybe he is, because he’ll get to restock on all that fishing gear that he threw out fifteen years ago. And on the other hand, maybe he isn’t serious, because he suggested this when he had the better part of four cartons under his belt. Anyway, it’s a tough decision. I’m getting the feeling we’ll sort it out later.