Pond-hopping has been a US bass-fishing staple for years - hop one suburban pond to the next with a small lure and a stripped-down setup, see how many species you can rack up before sundown. SinghFishing has now translated the format into Melbourne's outer suburbs, with a crew of subscribers and a couple of fish that prove the city's stocked lakes and creeks have more to offer than most anglers realise.
"If you guys watch a lot of American fishing videos, pond hopping is basically just a fishing challenge," Singh told viewers in the opener. "You essentially hop from one pond to another to try and catch as much fish as you can." The crew - Jeffy, Blake, Lawson, Hudson and Zach - kicked off at Pakenham Lake in the city's south-east. The bite was slow until Blake hooked the first decent fish of the day, a 25 cm redfin perch with a chewed-up dorsal fin. "His fin is like proper broken," Singh said, before releasing the fish and packing up for stop two.
Rowville, a return spot for Singh, came with a familiar warning. "Rowville is usually a tough lake to fish," he said, before relying on Sammy, a Rowville regular and fellow YouTuber, to put him on a likely-looking corner. The big takeaway from Rowville came after Sammy donated a split shot for an unweighted Z-Man-style soft plastic Singh had been struggling to cast. "Way better casting distance and sink rate is way better as well," Singh said. The rig produced a quick, clean eat that surprised the whole group.
The identification debate that followed is the kind of thing that turns a casual fishing video into a learning piece. "Wait, is that a bass?" one of the crew said. "I thought EP have like a dented head." Singh studied the fish in his hands. "Bass have red eyes, right? It's got red eyes. It's relatively smooth here. Is it a bass or is it an EP? I don't know. But hey, that's my, I'm not sure if it's my first bass because in Sydney, I'm pretty sure the lakes there have bass and I used to catch them." The fish went back unhurt either way.
A detour to a small creek beside a Melbourne golf course produced a redfin under blackberry overhangs. "The reason why I say I don't know if I can fish here is because technically there's a golf course," Singh said, mapping out a self-imposed boundary that kept him on the public-creek side rather than the course's frontage. The fish dropped the hook in cover and the rescue mission left him with cuts that lasted, by his own count, two weeks. "It wouldn't be a SinghFishing video without some cut fishing," he conceded.
The day's headline came at the last stop, where Singh and his crew shifted from blind-casting to sight-fishing carp. "Instead of the fish finding us, I decided, why don't I go and find the fish?" he said. With a piece of bread on the hook, he stalked two cruising commons through chest-deep grass until one ate. The fight on six-pound line was, in his words, "definitely a tough mission" - the line twisting badly enough that he eventually had to wade in to net the fish.
The carp taped at 59 cm. "We put like blood, sweat and tears into this fish. We went around the lake almost two times," Singh said. He released it cleanly and signed off with a thank-you to the subscribers - "about 50 subscribers away from hitting 7K" - and a teaser about a future song-drop at the 10K milestone.
For anglers reading this from elsewhere in Australia, the takeaway is simple. The suburban-pond format works in this country, especially in Melbourne's outer south-east, provided the angler comes armed with a spinning combo, a soft plastic, a piece of bread, and the willingness to wade into knee-deep mud for a sight-fished common. SinghFishing's fish list - redfin, possible bass or estuary perch, common carp - is a fair sample of what stocked suburban water can produce on a quiet weekend.