To Infinity and Beyond!

by Luke Galea

Two weeks ago I had a very memorable freshwater kayak fishing session. It was freak’n awesome. I actually identified a very large freshwater pool on google earth but to get to it, I had to launch at a road bridge and kayak for quite a few kilometres to get to this hole that I wanted to fish. Kayaking for a few kilometres is easy, what I didn’t know was that kayaking would probably only make up one third of the distance I had to cover and the rest I actually had to drag my kayak over bare ground and push it through inch deep water where it was too shallow for me to sit in and paddle.

You see the resolution on google earth was quite pixellated. This with the dense canopy cover of vegetation made it impossible for me to gauge the depth of the water I would encounter before I got to this spot.

There were a couple of deep-ish spots along the way so I fished a few places and pulled a few sootys on the Megabass Dog-X Jr before reaching the main pool some 3 hours later.

Once I got to this main pool, there was utter relief and exhaustion but I was spurred on by the unknown fact that I had never fished this water before and I was damn excited.

I was fishing with my brand new Samurai Infinite matched with a Stella 3000FE and it didn’t take me long to find a fish to bend the stick. This rod is beautiful and I would go as far as to say it is the nicest rod I have ever used before in my life.

I was still using surface lures even though it was around 930am and hooked a couple of toga only for them to not stay connected due to their bony mouths. It is so frustrating losing one of these beautiful fish but that is the way with toga fishing. I remove the standard trebles on my megabass lures and usually trick them up with gamakatsu treble wide gap hooks which improve the hookup rate quite a bit due to their straighter hook points.

I landed a bunch of nice sootys throughout the day and actually hooked and lost 5 toga. I was so frustrated at losing these 5 toga. I only wanted one, just one to christen the new rod on. I then changed over to the Megabass Dog-X which is a larger surface lure but the best thing about it is that it contained larger trebles with a wider gape and longer shaft. In my opinion this is more beneficial for a toga hookup. The next toga that smashed the lure was not getting away and it turned out to be a new PB at 77cm. I was so stoked with this fish and the 5 I lost previously didn’t seem to matter much anymore.

Oh yeh dragging the kayak back to my car at the end of the day was absolute hell and I swear my arms are now a few inches longer. What a mission though. It was through sheer exhaustion that I looked back and thought of what a great day it was exploring new, “hard to get to” country in my kayak.

I came, I saw, I conquered!!

#gallery-3 {
margin: auto;
}
#gallery-3 .gallery-item {
float: left;
margin-top: 10px;
text-align: center;
width: 33%;
}
#gallery-3 img {
border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;
}
#gallery-3 .gallery-caption {
margin-left: 0;
}