Australian YouTuber Skip Cast spent six hours behind the wheel for what amounted to one quality Australian bass and a backup river the colour of chocolate, in a video that doubled as a reminder that not every kayak mission goes to script.
The trip targeted a long headwater pool — "a gorgeous headwater system," he tells viewers from the bank — that had produced the goods on a previous walk-in trip. This time he was launching the Hobie and trying to cover the full kilometre-plus stretch from the kayak before dark.
"Finally back out here on another mission. Feels like it's been ages," he says as he paddles into the pool. "This time we're out on the kayak. So, we're not doing any bank bashing today. We're out on the Hobie checking out a new spot once again."
The water looked inviting from the moment he arrived. Before the kayak even hit the surface, fish were moving around in the shallow margins. He had a quick subsurface flick from the bank with the Hurricane Sprat hybrid — "pretty much our go-to subsurface little plastic" — and lost a small fish in the launch zone. From there, the bite shut down.
The pool, he admits, looked obviously froggy. "It's definitely very froggy territory," he says, surveying the rock bars and weed lines. "Looking at this, I think this looks like somewhere where the live chatter would do really well. There's lots of long, streaky rock bars with all weed all around them."
"Very, very subtle take on the Kicker Curry," Skip Cast tells the camera once the fish is in the net. "Didn't even know I was hooked up until drag started peeling off. Very, very calm fish. Very, very weird fight, but a solid first one."
A pair of "aquarium bass" — his term for the dink-sized juveniles he hooked next — confirmed his suspicion that the bigger fish simply weren't on. He had planned to fish into the night in the hope the trophy fish would fire up after dark, but a brief encounter with an aggressive group near the launch convinced him to pull the pin.
"After that little interaction, I decided to wrap things up earlier than planned," he tells viewers, "just in case they decided to go and mess with my car, which has happened to me before."
The backup plan — running to a totally different river system the next morning and launching in the brackish reaches — fared even worse. The water was the colour of chocolate before he had even paddled up to the target zone.
"Once I paddled up to the area that I wanted to fish, it became obvious that it was going to be tough going," he says. "It was no surprise that there was no action apart from a half-hearted hit early on."
The takeaway from the trip was a reluctant admission that, sometimes, the homework doesn't pay off. "That's fishing for you," Skip Cast signs off. "Things don't always go to plan every time."
For anyone weighing up an Australian bass headwater run this autumn, the cautionary tale matters: Skip Cast's preferred surface and chatter approach died in the cold, slow water of a long pool that, on paper, should have fired.