Jewel in the Hawkesbury

Hi fishos,

After my last bass and EP expidition i finally made it back to the briny after a few weeks off. I have been chomping at the bit to gt amognst the action, reports of great fish have been coming in thick and fast. Usually i wouldn't mind hearing all the good news stories but when your grounded, boat out of action and fishless for a few weeks, it's like someone driving a nail thru your skull. Envy wouled be the word that comes to mind shortly after quite a few expletives.

Anyway we headed off to Mooney in the Hawkesbury system to chase some elusive jew plus a few other likely estuary suspects. Mooney is a tide-out system only. Don't even think about chasing fish on the in-coming, your wasting your time. The odd fish can be caught but the game is well and truely over. Really the catalyst for a good fishing session is the prawn run and this happens on the outgoing tide. If the prawns are on the move the fishing is phenomenal.

We hit our first deep hole of the morning, a special spot where we have scored a jew on every attempt so far; 7 fish in 5 sessions. The signs were ominous as prawns were being slurped off the surface by unseen predators. Some splashes were moving far too much water to be bream. Usually this spot produces straight away but the first half hour only saw i tailor to 1 1/2kgs. Not a bad fish and it gave a good account of itself. We drifted thru the hole and came to the back end where an eddie is created by the curving shoreline. The results were istantanious. My uncle Andy got the first tap which indicated the presence of jew. Saddly he missed out but looked around to hear my little reel screaming for mercy. In the next 45 minutes Andy and i had a ball on jewies to 3kgs. It was basically a fish a cast. We caught and released 15 jews with 3 double hook-ups in the process. I'm sure we woke every resident on the river and this one oyster farmer kept shaking his head in disapproval.

The bite shut down so we pushed up the creek a considerable distance to catch the last of the tide. I was targeting bream and perch on the fringes, Andy jewies and flathead in the chanel. You can do that in Mooney, the place is small enough for that kind of duel tactic. Until the tide stopped i landed a dozen fiesty bream to 30cms and quite a few quality perch. Andy got 1 more jew, just a little tacker, and a handful of 45cm plus lizards.

The tide stopped...then nothing. The whole place shut down as if someone flicked a switch. This was about 10am now and we still had the day to go. We persisted, as die-hards do, but really the full time siren had sounded. All we were doing was picking up the scraps.

The damage was done on Gulps. At the moment my go-to lure of choice is the 5" Jerk Minnows in the new assorted chicken colours. They all work. Try colours that shillouette well against the murky Hawkesbury water. Imitate a prawn colour if you can. Remember, colours of plastics change in the water. Something that looks scary to us might seem quite natural to fish.