Lessons from bass fishing at Blue Rock Dam

It wasn't too long ago that I approached lake fishing with a big ball sinker and a scrubbie tossed out as far as possible. If I hadn't' caught anything after an hour I surmised the lake probably didn't have any fish and we might as well go home. In the last few years fishing with members from the Preston Northcote Angling Club has taught me there are a huge number of angling techniques for any given situation. And changing just one tiny detail can be the difference between a bag of fish or an empty creel.

Good Friday I made the trip to Blue Rock Dam to fish with two administrators from anglingvictoria.com – Dunxy and Mick Tupong. Mick has a lot of success fish for bass on Blue Rock and he took us to a new spot he wanted to explore.

We started the fishing session by tossing around lures in 10 metres of water amongst the trees. I threw a bait rod over whilst piffing some lures around and still nothing. So we moved to a much shallower spot in 2-3 m of water on another part of the lake. I wasn't sure whether the weightless scrubbies were really getting to the bottom so I added a BB split shot and sure enough the bites started coming. This alerted me to two things. In the first spot my scrubbie was probably never on the bottom. Secondly, water depth, not just trees, can be crucial to your success. The shallows are obviously very warm this time of year whilst the deeper water is cooler. And in winter the reverse is true so perhaps that’s where the fish will shift to in the winter months. Whatever the case, if you are not getting bites try moving to shallower or deeper areas amongst the trees.

We must have caught over 30 bass for the day with the biggest just legal on 28cm. Almost all were caught on scrubbies. Clearly the fishery has several years to reach its full potential. Bass are a slow growing fish and it can take five years for them to break the 40cm mark. For that reason I think its essential all bass are returned to the water. They fight like demons and it would be a waste to strip the fishery of smaller fish when we could be fighting 40 cm plus fish in three to four years time. For that reason I am surprised the legal limit is only 28cm, it should be lifted to over 40cm in my opinion.

We were catching the odd redfin throughout the day but sunset brought on the big ones with two over 33cm. They came up great in the fry pan last night!