Mersey River, Weegena

Well I went and had a fish today when there were winds from the East to North East and it's some thing I knew would be a waste of time too! I have always known you never fish when there are winds from an Easterly direction. Started off from the bridge at Weegena and fished my way up stream of the Mersey River for around 800 mtrs or there about in water that was reasonably clear and very low.

The weather was quite mild and not a patch of blue sky was to be seen as it was blocked by a real thick cloud cover with some rain forecast later. It was 3.45 PM when I started spinning my way up the river and hell it was tough going as the river bottom was like an ice skating rink. Not only was it slippery but there were thick layers of water weeds & green cotton like algae in the whole 800 mtrs of the river that I fished making spinning very difficult. In all my years of fishing this area I have never seen it as bad as it was today, plus the bottom also had quite a lot of silt on it. Any way I still fished on and had to keep the rod tip much higher than normal when retrieving the spinner to stop it from being fouled up by the weeds & algae. The best I could manage over the distance of river that I fished today was three hit and misses from one fish on the retrieve in a fast water section. I did have around eight follows from some nice solid browns that just sat some 150-200 mms back from the spinner. There was another brown that would have gone close to the kilo mark that did stick much closer to the spinner and just kept nudging it with its nose but would not strike. So what I new would more than likely be a wasted trip this afternoon for hooking into a few fish still turned out to be an enjoyable one just being in a river. One thing I did notice too, there was not a sign of any insect life over the river while I was in it, yet when I arrived back at the car there were a few black spinners on the bonnet. Also I did not see any cormorants in the area or any sign of them being here either, so hopefully they may have moved back to the coastal areas.

Adrian Webb