Happy New Year to you all. I have nearly finished another family holiday in beautiful Yamba. What a place for a family holiday! The weather has been kind delivering family friendly surf and a few good fishing days. Fish have been hard to find, with only a few really good feeds of fish in a couple of weeks. Species have been varied and I have really had to try hard to find fish and have used different methods than I may normally use.

I love the bass catch. A great chance to fish and then talk rubbish about fishing over dinner. This year I was a bit strapped for time and not able to camp, so we decided to fish on Saturday afternoon and then go to the barbecue before the drive home. Daniel was with me, so we decided to fish from the tinny above Windsor. 

We recently had our club fishing day. We did some planting of trees on the river bank, had a barbecue and then spent a few hours fishing in the afternoon. I say a few hours but in reality it was about 6 hours of solid fishing. My total at the end was 2 fish, another one dropped and another good hit. I fished with Rico and he ended up with 4 with another one dropped. Two of his came from the one spot in the 5 minutes before it got dark. Short story is that  the fish were well and truly shut down.

Before last weekend I'd never caught a bass on a surface lure of any kind. Then I finally took one on a soft shell cicada and my boy Daniel got one on a hard Dreamfish cicada. Yesterday (21/10/16) I caught another 3 and had a 3 surface strikes that didn't hook up.

I've never had much success fishing with soft plastics for bream. Mostly because I've never really devoted any real effort to it. Flathead have been a slightly different matter but even then I've never had outstanding results. At the end of this recent bass season I decided that with all of the water available to me locally, it's something I should get better at. The bass kayak is the perfect tool for exploring skinny saltwater creeks.