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.