With a free weekend and an urge to get away from the country music, Aaron and Jarrod Keech and I organised a night of fishing for Murray cod.

We headed out at 9pm on Friday after Jarrod finished work. All week the weather had been fine but as the sun went down, the clouds began to build up.

The barometer was falling and the sky began to fill with lightning. We sat around at home and talked about whether we should go. It looked as though the storm might miss where we were heading so we decided to go.

We travelled about 45 minutes towards our destination and around 8km from the spot it started to bucket down, so we headed home, much to our disappointment.

We decided to head out again the following weekend, rain, hail or shine. This time we made it but you could see that there had been a heavy downfall just before we arrived.

Jarrod pulled his near-new graphite stick out of its case and found it had a broken tip. He'd used it only twice. Luckily I had brought a spare rod so he used that.

We had a chat to a couple of campers who had a done a bit of fishing but hadn't had any luck before we flicked a few lures around in front of their camp.

Jarrod was using a little Jitter Bug surface lure and Aaron was using a Bassman spinnerbait, so I decided on use a Strike Pro 70mm lipless crankbait. On the fourth cast I was on with a small Murray, which I let go.

We went for a stroll up the creek and flicked lures around and I had another hit on my crankbait. Jarrod and Aaron hadn't had any luck but that wasn't going to stop them from trying.

We had to work pretty hard to get the fish to liven up. Later that night I landed a couple more fish on surface lures and Aaron had a great hit on his spinnerbait but Jarrod had no luck – it just wasn't his day.

We'd been out a few hours when the wind came up and the rain was just over the hill so we decided to call it a night. Overall, we’d had an interesting night, even though I was the only one to catch a fish.

This baby Murray cod hit a surface lure in a local stream.