Where's Wally?

The Wallagaraugh River is in southern NSW, or northern Victoria, depending on which stretch of the river you happen to be on at the time. It's a big river, wide and deep in parts while other areas are narrow or shallow. And upstream, near where the Princes Highway crosses the river, it breaks out into pools.

For anglers who regularly fish Mallacoota, the Wallagaraugh is well-known and affectionately called The Wally. Some fishing reports from this part of the world refer to the Genoa River, when in fact the fish were caught in the Wallagaraugh. The reason for this might be that the Wallagaraugh flows into the Genoa upstream of Gypsy Point. The junction is signposted, but it's easy to get confused.

Mind you, for most anglers, where they caught their fish is less important than what they caught. As for telling everyone where they were fishing, well, then you begin to understand why there is sometimes some geographical confusion. But from the river junction, it's downstream all the way to Mallacoota.

Picture the scene: in Melbourne and the rest of southern Victoria, gale force winds, rain and hail are wreaking havoc. Meanwhile, on the Wallagaraugh, the water is calm. Low-lying cumulus clouds are scuttling around the ranges, but there is no wind; the sun is out and the fish are on the bite.

I have read, and heard, anglers express sorrow for those people not on the water enjoying themselves. The sensitive new age angler is little different from the Sensitive New Age Guy, or SNAG as the beautiful people like to call them. I was reminded of this that afternoon on the Wallagaraugh while spinning for dusky flathead with Clint Logan.

It's a job, and you know the rest...

Drifting over shallow flats, with the sun out and the wind barely a zephyr, it was difficult to relate to climatic conditions at home. Nor did I care. A snag is something I put on a barbecue. I don't think about home when I'm fishing, and I never, ever, turn the mobile phone on. When you're out on the water, there are far more serious issues to worry about. Namely the action at hand.

On this day, the big black lizards were hungry. Clint and I were fishing from his Edgetracker. About 4m long, it features the flat bottom and built-in floor that makes these small craft so stable and such ideal platforms for this style of fishing. A bow-mounted Minn Kota electric gave us the ability to sneak around without disturbing our quarry.

We were offering up snacks of tiny Halco Scorpions, Legends, and the like. Trying to induce a strike, we would flick our lures out and retrieve slowly. Twitch, pause, and crank - actions we hoped were imitating a crippled baitfish. In America, they call lures worked like this 'jerk baits'. I'm not American. To me this is spinning, and this day everything was working. The flathead, like the weather, were cooperating, and we were enjoying tight lines and bowed rods on some reasonable fish.

When a big dusky strikes the lure, the take is aggressive and hard. The large head shakes and sometimes the fish breaks the surface attempting to toss the lure.

Other lures to be successful that day included pink and silver Galaxia Minnows and black Micro Minnows.

The flathead is a predator, and I enjoy fishing for them. There are more than 30 species of flathead in our waters. It's the inshore species, like the dusky and the yank, that offer anglers an exceptional challenge. The angling attributes of a big frog are not to be scoffed at. Flathead will take deadbaits, livebaits, lures, and flies.

You can work them up a berley trail, or simply sight fish them on days when the water is clear. About the only thing they won't do is tail walk. But I've seen a couple of crocs almost come out of the water, executing a body roll during a take.

Clint and his wife Debbie are keen anglers who own the Wallagaraugh Retreat camping and caravan resort. It's situated on the banks of the Wallagaraugh, just a little south of the New South Wales border. Clint used to be a landscaper with a passion for reptiles. These days he is far more interested fishing, preferring to be on the water doing research for customers than working at the resort.

To say Clint is a keen angler is an understatement.

"Everyday I try to put some time in on the water," he explains. But it might be getting too much for him, because he's starting to complain about the suffering he is having to endure from Repetitive Strain Injury. That I should be so lucky!

"Debbie really runs the business,'' he says, "I just work around the place and take off fishing when I can."

Which can annoy Debbie, who also happens to prefer being on the water. On my last visit, Debbie got to the point where she decided she wanted some quality fishing time as well. On that trip, Debbie had given Clint the week off to fish with me. Clint said the bream were starting to run and the flathead were moving upriver after a minor flood, so it was a good time. A couple of bream topping four pounds on the old scale are nothing to sneeze at, and this water regularly produces dusky flathead in excess of 5kg.

The week before I arrived, father and son anglers, Ted and Cameron Wittam, caught and released more than 100 flathead, several of them nudging 4kg.

When Ted and Cameron left, they took the weather with them. The wind blew and the rain fell for a couple of days, but we simply edged close to shore and fished in the lee of tea-trees. Our first stop was some sand and mud flats a few kilometres downstream from the Retreat, or about 10 minutes by boat. We were spinning with 3kg outfits, and the first hook-up was a 3.63kg frog that scoffed a small Halco Scorpion.

Nothing lasts forever, and on days when the flathead fishing backed off, we went in search of black bream. Bream in excess of 2kg had been caught in the weeks before my arrival, and Debbie had been doing particularly well. These are big bream by anyone's measure.

Our chosen method was to use unweighted prawns and fish the snags along the river. We were unable to top the 2kg mark, but you can't complain when the average bream falling to our unweighted prawns was about 1kg.

But this wasn't good enough for Debbie. There is a little bit of piscatorial competition between her and Clint, and she was biting at the bit to get on the water. The park didn't have many tenants, so she decided it was time to go and show us how it was done. With Debbie fishing with local Genoa resident Gary McCorkell in another boat, we leapfrogged each other along the river. Clint managed a fish of about three-and-a-half pounds; Gary did the same. There were plenty of 1kg fish, but we didn't top 2kg, although Debbie went closest with a fish of three pounds 10 ounces.

The estuaries of Far East Gippsland (as the tourism people like to call the area) and southern New South Wales offer great fishing opportunities. Particularly if you happen to have a boat. Places like Wonboyn, Wingan Inlet, Bemm River and Lake Tyers, to name a few, are exciting places to be when the fish are running. As well as flathead and bream, many of these estuaries hold good stocks of mullet, estuary perch and, in the upper reaches, Australian bass. Species such as tailor, Australian salmon, silver trevally, tarwhine and mulloway can be counted on to make regular stops to many of these waters.

I enjoy fishing with people like Clint, because you can't do any better than local knowledge. Clint uses all three fishing disciplines: bait, lure and fly. The choice of method comes down to the conditions and the species targeted. Likely looking snags are fished with unweighted prawns for bream or estuary perch. Areas where the river shallows and there are sand flats lined with weed beds are the domains of the big duskies. Here lures take preference over prawns. A patch of grass on the bank in front of a sand bank is always worth a cast. But a prawn can still yield a bream, as these fish often move into shallow water to forage on overcast days.

Clint has caught dusky flathead as big as 14 pounds on the old scale, which is the proper weight for fish among old-timers, and likes to tell of the monster lizard he lost after a 40 minute battle. As we motor along the river from one fish-yielding snag to another, Clint likes to point out recently fallen trees that "have the potential to be good perch or bream holding areas in spring".

It's a pristine part of the world, one that gets better the further away from civilisation you head. One stretch of the river boasts a tropical rainforest, and that's about what it is. Tall trees and dense scrub covered in verdant green vines. If you weren't so far south, you'd swear you were in North Queensland fishing along the Daintree. Mind you, there are no crocodiles in the Wallagaraugh, although the goannas in this part of the world can grow to a fair size.

Upstream from the Resort, past Johnson Bridge, is the famous Bullring. Known for its bream, the Bullring is a bend in the river with a small island and plenty of rushes and trees. Nobody knows how it got its name, but the area is often very productive. If you motor upstream as far as you can go, you reach a wall of rocks. Park the boat on the north side of the river, scramble through the scrub and you reach the first of the freshwater pools, which are known for their Australian bass.

As the saying goes: so many fish... but so little time.