On the coldest morning of the year, with the gauge reading just 11 degrees at the ramp, the angler behind Micks Gone Fishing rescued a slow winter creek session with a single small tweak — and filled the session with threadfin salmon in the process.
The morning began badly. Sneaking into a coastal creek on a rising tide, he found the cold had the fish shut down. "Eleven degrees ain't going to be very fun for a barra," he admitted, and a stretch he banked on produced "not even a touch."
The turning point came after marking fish holding deep and lethargic in about four metres of water. Instead of forcing the issue, he downsized to a small soft-plastic prawn and wrapped lead wire onto the jighead to slow its descent. "This lead wire makes them sink that much slower," he explained — a slow, natural fall that sluggish, cold-water fish could eat without chasing.
The first threadfin came reluctantly, but it cracked the code. "Once you work out what they want," he said, the bites kept coming on the tiny prawn fished on light spin gear. Patience mattered: several of the best fish came from the middle of the channel, not the snags. "Two of the bites I got were right out in the middle," he noted. "So don't give up too early."
By the time the tide turned and the current killed the light presentation, the crew had landed a tidy run of healthy threadfin — "six, seven, eight" between them. "We found what they want — little prawns," he summed up. "Not big ones today." His repeated mantra, half-joking but genuinely earned, was simple: "don't stop believing."
The lesson for any winter estuary angler is worth keeping: when cold water pushes fish deep and quiet, scale right down, slow the fall with a touch of lead wire on a small prawn, and give it time to reach them. A potential "rage quit" became a satisfying session on the back of one little trick.