Jack Attack!.....a lure test.

Last Saturday was another of those rare days when Debbie had a day off from selling real estate. There was no question as to what we were going to do...it was just a matter of deciding on which river to fish.

During the week I had ventured north to Bransfords Tackle Shop. It was a recon trip to check if my little spinning reel was back from the service guy, to pick up a new tide chart and to catch up with young Matty......all right, all right, I really wanted to check some new lures that had just arrived. There were a few Rapala xxx rap divers in ghost (my new favourite colour) mini Halco poppers and heaps of soft plastics etc. But then Matty showed me this brand new little 2" gold Bomber.

I had to have one!

Readers will all be very familiar with the famous gold bomber Long A...arguably one of the best barra lures ever invented, and its small brother the 3" shallow minnow. But this little beauty was different. It was a bit fatter in shape, had quality VMC hooks and would cast wonderfully well on my sooty outfit.



High Tide at the boat ramp

Loading the tinny

Saturday morning could not come around quick enough, but soon, here was Debbie & I cruising down the Bruce Highway heading for Liverpool Creek. Just out of Cairns the heavens opened up and persistent rain follows us all the way south. When we arrived at our launch spot, the river was high with a 3.4m tide peaking at approx. 9.00am. This, together with the fresh coming down, should give us an easy passage right up the river. I juts love fishing way upstream in our tropical rain forest rivers....the fishing is usually very rewarding and the scenery, well...just stunning!

Now we had not been down there for many months, but I did remember that one of the local bridges connecting farms etc had been damaged by last years flood. As we rounded the bend, what greeted us presented a bit of a challenge. You see, the powers that be had built this brand new concrete bridge. But in their wisdom, they had bolted concrete "buffers" all the way along the sides thus making progress upstream impossible in my boats current configuration.

Approaching the bridge

Under the bridge

Popping out the upside

Made it...lets put the boat back together

Being a resourceful soul, we removed the rocket launcher, took out the bum & middle seat, unbolted the electric and lay down flat on the floor. We inched our way up and under an popped out the other side. Thankfully the tide would drop by almost 3 m throughout the day so unless we had absolutely torrential rain, we would be able to traverse back down quite easily.

Zoom on......way upstream....under the main highway bridge.....past shallow rapids, logs and sand bars etc. and came to rest under the shade of a huge rain forest tree. Time for morning cuppa and breakfast.

Cruising upstream

Main highway bridge 

How's the coffee and muffin Deb?

Readers may remember that Debbie penned a lovely article on the Liverpool Creek several years ago.
It was a reflective piece on how cyclone Larry had ravaged the region. Stripped all the bankside vegetation, smashed most of the trees and absolutely devastated the place. Move on a few years and here we have this gem of a stream recovering very, very well....she is a beautiful little river.

I'm going to try that new Bomber lure baby!

Drifting downstream on the current was a little challenging this day. The river was not in flood, but certainly had enough water to push us along quite swiftly. In fact it did make casting to structure a bit difficult at times. To slow our drift we plonked our "lead blob" over the side and used this a slow our descent. In the faster runs it made for easy fishing...in the slower stretched it was a breeze and with gentle encouragement from the electric we had ideal fishing conditions.

First fish...juvenile barra

I forgot to mention that we did have one brief stop in a quiet backwater on the way up stream. The river height was a worry however, as the high tide had backed up the waters way into the fringing mangroves. In scenarios like this, its darn hard to get old bucket mouth to bite but I did manage one little barra.

The hit came fast and furious! At first I thought that I had hooked up to a little barra, but upon settling into the fight, I realised that I had a feisty jack attached to my shiny new offering. All I could think of at this stage was to land it, take a nice pic for Mathew (Bransfords) and show him that this new lure did work...well on jacks anyway.

Nice jack Les....new gold Bomber 2" lure

This new Bomber lure is quite heavy for its size and casts like a rocket. One small "irritation" however, was that the front treble got caught on the snap quite a few times. I could have played around with different tow point connections etc. or even changed to a smaller hook up front, but I wanted to test this lure "straight out of the box" so to speak and give it a thorough work out.

And a workout I did. Man it was "flavour of the month" (day at least). I caught jacks (they just smashed it), tarpon, JP's and more jacks. How do I rate it - 9.5 out of 10. The front hook configuration the only minor draw back.

Check it out...looking good!

Close up of the pointy end of a jack & lure

Jacks...they just smashed it!

I have used various bomber lures for well over 30 years and this little gem is certainly going to be a regular in my stable of preferred lures.

Now back to the fishing / drifting.

JP's loved it too

A quality jack from the fresh

And another...this was fun

The fish count was mounting, the species caught growing and the fun...well, I just love this kind of fishing. We even played the good Samaritan role at one stage - rounding a bend we found a damsel in distress. She and a few mates were fishing from the bank and she had cast right across the river and hooked her lure onto a snag. "Would you like us to help?" And being the nice guy that I am, I let Debbi retrieve the line while I positioned the boat in the current, putted upstream and jerked the lure from the log. Saved!

You never know what you might see

Young group having fun...we saved the day Ha Ha!

By the time we had made our way downstream to the tidal zone, the river had dropped significantly enough to slow the rushing water. It was a more sedate, gentle trip for the last couple of k's. But the jacks kept coming. And as for the barra. They were very conspicuous by their absence. We only landed the two, but what the heck, the jacks had certainly made up for it.

In all we landed

• 20 jacks (check out more pics below)
• 8 JP's
• 2 barra
• 1 tapon
• 1 sooty

Silver bullet...tarpon

Deb and the only sooty

Now this is a quality JP

Juvenile barra

It was a late trip home made even more so by the many road works on the old Bruce. She is suffering again from the effects of a decent "wet". When will the authorities give us the road network that we deserve?

Catch you on the water.
Regards, Les
www.fishingcairns.com.au

NOTE - Bransfords now have in stock the new tide chart

Jack....shallow shad this time!

Is deb happy?

You bet!

And to top off the day....Jack Attack!

Match The Hatch - Flying Ants

How on earth can you match the hatch, when thousands of insects are floating downstream on the current lines; and literally hundreds of fish are slurping them off the surface?

But I am getting ahead of myself!

It was a perfect day - very little wind, hardly a cloud in the sky and the river was shining like silver as it flowed down a lush green, tree lined valley. Man, the upper reached of the Russell River sure was a picture to behold. But getting there had a few challenges, check out the boat ramp in the pic hereabouts!

Main "boat ramp"...upper Russell River

A bridge somewhere!

But we were soon on our way and zooming upstream....I decide to head as far upstream as I could (read - DARED!) Past sand bars and shallow rocky rapids, under old railway bridges and high motor ways, sunken timber and prop busting logs....it was an exhilarating ride! And as Keith and I came off the plane....lets catch our breath, take in all of this natural beauty and have a coffee under the shade. Being in such natural beauty sure made us realise just what a paradise Tropical North Queensland truly is.

How's this for morning tea!

While heavy into "fishy" conversation (err...what lure mate and stuff like that?) we did notice that there were little splashes all around us. Upon closer examination we discovered that hundreds of sooties & JP's were actually slurping floating insects from the surface. Wherever the main current line drifted downstream and as far as the eye could see in both directions, fish were in feeding mode - in all  my years of fishing tropical streams, I had never witnessed such a feeding orgy. What this did show us however, was a few things like;

1. The river held fish stocks way above expectation
2. Fish will feed way out in the open if food is there
3. When they are singularly focussed on drowned flying ants - its hard to get a lure to match
4. Do we have to carry fly fishing gear as well?
5. The bio mass of insect life was huge - this event occurred literally for miles downstream

Nice sooty...on a GREEN popper!

At first we tried to cast our offerings, poppers and hard bodied diving minnows to these slurping fish. We had a few half hearted follows and even managed to land a couple of sooties - but in the main, a cast would receive instant "interest" on the touch down, but after the initial inspection the bloody fish would realise that this big lump of plastic was nothing like a little delicate drowning insect and bugger off. Man it was frustrating!

I'm really not sure how it happened, but we switched out attention to the deeper snags....that's right, we decided to fish the river side with the most current. Maybe this is where the most "burley - insects" would end up anyway and maybe, just maybe, these areas held the most actively feeding fish. The tally was mounting.

Show off Keith...I caught one too!

JP on that green thing...deep diver!

NOTE - many reader will know what lures we prefer in these fresh water upper reaches - Rapala SR5's (get it)...but initially these weren't the flavour of the month either. I can't remember how often I changed my lure, but it was probably more than I have done so for the past 12 months combined, such was the frustration at seeing all these feeding fish, but not hooking up often enough. I tried deeper divers, shallow runners, medium runners, poppers of all shapes, sizes and colour - I tried poppers with "flash" on the trailing hook but this made no real difference. And then I found this little deep diving green thing that was in the bottom tray of my tackle box - it was brand new, but had been there for years.

Now that's a nice JP Keith!



Yeah, yeah, two at a time...see that green lure again!

I cast to the steep bank up in the shade, cranked it down and BANG! I was onto a quality sooty. Had I finally cracked the code? (Oh, Keith had found something that worked for him too - the tally was mounting). At one stage we drifted over a submerged snag in about 2 metres of water. I could see a quality big black sooty lying just downstream for the main log....but we were right on top of the structure by now, so more so in hope, than expectation, I tossed my little lure about a metre and started to wind. In a flash I was on...we couldn't believe it that a quality sooty would slam our lure right next to the boat....amazing stuff.

Quality lure crunching sooty!

Not too long after this incident, a similar thing happened on the opposite bank. But this time it was a monster JP. She just rolled over the timber and snaffled my little green lure......unfortunately the hooks pulled right at the boat so a photo opportunity was lost - I would have loved to show you how big, shiny and beautiful it was!

And then it happened; I lost that "magic" lure....not sure how, but the leader pulled from the double and I wound in the limp, lifeless braid. I retied another lure and off we went........I again was faced with the dilemma of choosing the right lure and by now Keith had switched back to the SR5 (get it again) and was out fishing me 2 to one....bugger. It was my boat too!

Tried this lure for a while too!

Keith again...he was getting ahead in the tally count!

If you can't beat em, join em I say........so with great reluctance (oh yeah!), I tied on my all time favourite, the very special, wonderfully successful, proven time and time again...SR5.
So what's my favourite sooty lure you ask ?

As we drifted down the hours passed - we had lunch under another beautiful shady tree and watched more fish slurp insects from the surface. I can't believe this was still happening. We followed the main current flow, switching from side to side of the river, and caught dozens of sooties. Under shady trees we picked up lovely JP's and in back eddies, the very acrobatic, silver sided tarpon crunched our offerings.

Beautiful silver tarpon

It was such a wonderful day we even forgot the time, the light was perfect, the weather superb and the scenery...well, a picture tells a thousand words. Just have a look at these and judge for yourself.

Check out that view!

By about 5:30pm we decided that we had better make a move to go home...so reluctantly we packed away our rods and zoomed the few remaining k's to our launch spot. Reflecting on the day we were in such a BUZZ! What a magnificent day it had been, Keith and I were absolutely stoked...and why wouldn't you be after fishing in paradise and landing about 50 fish.

Catch you on the water, regards Les
www.fishingcairns.com.au

PS - what's that lure again?
PPS - what colour, perch or green today?