It’s been interesting watching the take up in fishing for bigger Cod in southern Impoundments over winter. Slowly but surely the word has leaked out in regard to the opportunity’s that present in places other than Copeton Dam in northern NSW. Not so long ago during the depths of winter on dams such as Wyangala, Burrenjuck, and Blowering you could have set off an artillery 21-gun salute and not a soul would have heard it…

The Goulburn river starts south of Eildon around a little town called Woods point, from here it travels 654 kilometres through Lake Eildon, Alexandra, Seymour, Nagambie, Murchison, Shepparton to the Murray river around Echuca. The upper reaches of the Goulburn offer brilliant trout fishing, as you get down to Seymour Murray Cod become more prevalent, and from Murchison down the water is all fairly similar, great fishing for natives. The stretch from Murchison to where it flows into the Murray is where this article is focusing on.

With my first bub due later in the year I thought it was about time I pulled my finger out and came up to Darwin for a few days to try out the Balista’s. I’ve been doing a sales run from my hometown of Shepparton up to Cairns twice a year for the last 3 years. The first year was more about refining the Balista products to perform well on Barra which required a few tweaks with performance, upgrading the standard hardware that comes on our lures as well as adding more Barra specific colours into the range including UV paints.

The attributes I love most about bass is their aggressive nature and brutal pulling power, especially for their size. On a recent trip to Port Macquarie I was fishing with a good mate James Newton, the plan was to walk the banks and fish this pristine river that James had access to. The river we fished was more of a creek in width but had plenty of deep pools in it, trees overhanging the river provided shade all day long. In this scenario where the water was quite dark from the shade the LED light in the lures that we were using was particularly bright.

Twice a year I make the drive from Shepparton Victoria up to Cairns to do a sales run to our Queensland barra store. I’ve always got plenty of fishing tied in with the trip, this time I had organized a couple of days fishing with Merv Hughes and Lindsay Dobe on Peter Faust dam.

I have an old mate that is ex army who was from the Gold Coast many years ago, he has told many stories of finishing a day on the barracks and heading out to paddle around Hinze dam throwing surface lures for big bass. Upon arriving to the Gold Coast I was pretty excited to finally get a chance to fish Hinze dam.

Upon arriving on a recent trip to Lake Windermere we were confronted with low water temperatures and a super tough bite. It’s well known that Golden Perch are easiest to locate and catch when the water temperature is in the 18-22 degree range. When you start getting down to 14 degrees its just as challenging as trying to push start a car up hill. Local bloke Glen Stewart offered to take us out fishing for a couple of sessions, with 25 years of experience on the lake we were very grateful to be shown around the lake.

Lake Eildon is one of the diverse waterways not just in Victoria but also in Australia. How many places can you think of where you can go fishing for a day and be in the mix to catch trophy Golden Perch, Trout, Murray Cod and Red Fin? The opportunities are endless but are they by no means easy, I have spent many trips exploring Eildon and when you think you have it figured out the lake will throw you a curve ball, you can go from having a big day out one day to drawing a blank the next doing exactly the same thing.

After dark is a new concept we've been refining for quite some time now, its a significantly reduced LED light specifically for night time fishing. We've found at night time our standard LED can be too bright, when activated at night it creates a huge glow around the tail. The After Dark has a reduced LED, and we've painted over the tail to block out the large glow from the LED at night.

Barramundi and Murray Cod are legendary Australian Sportsfish, they both grow well over a metre, and both are implosion feeders. Rather than opening their mouths and biting into something like we would do with a big chocolate donut they open their mouths so quickly that they suck down that donut with a single slurp quicker than you can say ‘on’.