I’m currently in the Noosa area to attend a wedding at the end of the week, and as usual I made sure I bought a selection of rods along incase an opportunity presented itself to go for a flick.

I headed up the coast with ideas of walking the banks and hunting down some Mangrove Jacks, but as I’ve never been here before, I was going in blind. I arrived at our hotel, unloaded the car and went for a drive to see what my options were. I quickly discovered that it was going to be much harder than I had anticipated, and with none of boat hire businesses on the river offering boats with an electric, my prospects of fishing the way I wanted were getting smaller and smaller.

I ducked over to see the guys at Davo’s Tackleworld Noosa to get some local advice, and with a few new lures I was set for an afternoon towards the mouth of the river. My wife and I were looking to kill some time in the afternoon and she wasn’t keen on sitting on the bank while I flicked plastics for hours on end, so we thought why not just go to the Bli Bli Barra Fishing Park  for a cruisy afternoon of fishing the ponds for a couple of Barra, something that we definitely don’t get to do back on the NSW South Coast.

Now my wife is not into fishing at all, and the only other time she has participated was when we fished at the Mulwalla Cod Classic two years ago, so I was pretty stoked that this was something that she was happy to participate in.

We arrived and payed our $30 each for 3 hours of fishing which we had timed for 4pm until close at 7pm. I had taken along a couple of my own rods and lures, as I had heard they had a “Big Boy Pond” that holds fish that measure over 1m. Included with our fee, we were also provided a rod and reel each and some pellets, which the fish are accustomed to eating with everyone who goes there using them to catch them, the fish are not fed by the park, only by the visitors. After a brief chat with the guy at the store, we wandered out and gave the pellets a go. We cast out, then threw a few pellets in the direction of where our bait landed and waited. These fish are pretty smart, as the picked out our pellets with hooks and avoided them. We went for a location change to a narrower location, as I always prefer to fish in a hallway over a football field, and it wasn’t long until our luck changed. It took us 3 refills of pellets ($8 each), but we landed 5 fish and dropped another 3. I cast a few lures into the Big Boy Pond, but with all the action happening on the other side, I quickly gave up on that idea. I was told the included equipment was spooled with 6lb line and the fish went like the clap, running and jumping all over the ponds. Whilst I was there, I did witness some guys fishing the Big Boy Pond with surface lures and land 3 or 4 fish between them.

All in all a great afternoon for the two of us, especially my non fishing wife. With our first child on the way, if we’re ever in the area again and I know I’ll be bringing our little one here to catch a fish!