At 5:40am the river was more grey than green. The willows held their breath, the tinny made one soft scrape against the bank and the only sensible plan was to slow down until the water had a chance to wake up.
Start before the colour arrives
Murray cod water rewards a lack of urgency. We killed the motor well upstream and let the current make the final decision. In the first pale light, every drowned branch looked like a possibility. The trick was not to cast at all of them; it was to look for the one with a pocket of quiet behind it.
A lure with a slower heartbeat
The wakebait was hand-carved, dark green and a little awkward on the first few retrieves. It did not dart or shout. It made one measured V in the surface film, paused beside the timber and carried on. That pause was the entire point. A cod does not always want an answer. Sometimes it wants a question that hangs in the water.
Keep the memory, not the fish
The take came so close to the boat that neither of us spoke for a while. After a careful fight and a few seconds beside the gunwale, the fish eased back into the river. The splash was smaller than expected. The silence after it was not.
“The strike did not break the silence. It rearranged it.”
There is a habit of treating the catch as the full stop. Out here, it is only a comma. The water keeps moving, the weather changes its mind and there is always one more careful cast before the ramp.
