We went down to Shady again and hit my favourite spot on the outgoing, we refer to as “Mud’s Run”.

Straight away my mate MarkR pulled out a 59cm, already bettering his effort the week before. From there we started getting fish, I got a couple around 57cm and the rest were undersized. We soon moved to give prime position to MarkF and Tom but they didn’t manage to get anything, so left to do some trolling. They later reported to getting one decent barra each, one 60cm and one 65cm.

We went back to poll position, and nearly straight away I pulled out a 59cm.

We kept getting regular fish, so we didn’t want to leave. Soon – bang – I was on with a great fish! The water was absolutely pouring out, so I struggled with it, it took quite a while to get it to the boat. When we got it out my arm was dead – totally cramping up. It had never happened before but I struggled to let the rod go. But the fish measured out at 81cm.

I took a small break to relax my arm before getting back into it, and not long after I hooked onto another decent fish. Once again, the size of the fish combined with the fierce current meant it was a really decent fight. When I got this guy back to the boat he was 70cm, but additionally my arm was so bad I had to use my left hand to individually pry each of my fingers off the rod. I had just totally lost control of it. I was forced to admit at this point that I was done for the day. I took the fillets off the big ones (might have been a mistake as at the time of writing I’ve eaten one and it tastes terrible) while my mate fished, who got another keeper. In the end I got close to 20 fish, legal ones were: 57, 57, 59, 70, 81.

I will have to remember that this place functions well om outgoing tides towards the low.

With the “once in a generation” wet season we have had, we were all keen to get down to Shady camp.

We found the road was ‘better than expected’ and hit the barrages first thing. Catching fish was reasonably easy, however they were all fairly small.

Tom and Mark F’s boat got over 10. I got 8 for the day, including one on a popper. Mark R wasn’t managing to get anything, but fortunately pulled up our only legal fella at 55cm right at the end of the day.

Story of the day was two helifishing tours landed right next to us at the spot Mud used to take me 10 years ago – never seen that happen before.

We were supposed to go to Shady this weekend but because of the generational wet season we couldn’t – it was flooded out and the road was dead.

So we went to Micketts and didn’t expect much of the neaps. Mark got a 60cm but we were quite surprised at Tom pulling in a fish at exactly 100cm!

The fish did a great job of wrapping itself around a snag, and I genuinely thought there was little chance that Tom would be able to land it, he did a great job even if it required dropping his rod into the water. He was too big for the net so we did a combined “grippers on the mouth and net on the tail” maneuver.

I tried all day and got nothing but heatstroke.