REPORT: Vic Bream Classic Round 4 – Glenelg river

Pre-fish day for round 4 of the Vic Bream classic dawned and we hit the water in beautiful winter conditions – still, crisp and with a great sunrise. We were here to fish the Glenelg river in far western Victoria for the next 3 days.
Pre-fish saw us fish all up and down the river searching for bream and likely locations we wanted to hit up for the competition, we ventured right down to the mouth of the river for a look and Rob managed to get onto a nice size fish early, the surrounding boats heard the drag scream as line was peeled from his reel in the still morning air, damn! we gave that one away pretty quickly!
We spent the rest of the day gradually heading upstream fishing likely banks and rock walls. We were seeing heaps of fish on the sounder schooled up on the second drop off along most of the river, some of which ended up being small bream and some which were juvenile mulloway, both of which we caught after a bit of perseverance.
Through the day we managed to find a few legal fish along the mid section of the river and up into SA, working steep undercut banks with lightly weighted soft plastics, so we kind of had a plan together for the competition although overall the fishing was pretty damn quiet, not a good sign.

Day 1

Day 1 saw us head straight up near the border and hit up some rock walls which we caught some fish on in the pre-fish, we managed to get 2 fish that just went legal in the first hour, again using zman 2″ grubs rigged very lightly. But after that things went very quiet and we spent a lot of time, too much time searching again for fish. We kept trying the same sort of areas and terrain but only got a few undersize fish. We decided to make a big move way up river and was surprised to see so many other boats up that far. The last few hours of the day saw us find some fish but again all undersize, but it was better than the middle section of the river which we had not even had a touch. We ended up with only those 2 fish for day 1 which was a disappointing result leaving us in 35th position after the weigh in.

Day 2

After hearing a few people had done well down the front of the system and a few had also done well way up river we decided to hedge our bets and head way up river. We new there would be a lot of boats down the mouth and the weather was a bit calmer than day 1 which would also make the front harder to fish. We headed up river for about 1.5hrs and started on some nice looking snaggy rocky banks. It didn’t quite go to plan with not much action at all, a few small bream and a perch saw us through the first hour. I decided to change tact and throw a Atomic shad 40 hardbody to mix it up bit and was rewarded with a small legal fish 10 minutes later. It was still quiet so we decided to try some different shallower banks that also had reed edges. This move made all the difference with a good 900gram fish caught in the first 5 minutes and then another small legal 5 minutes later. Over the course of the next 2 hours we worked that bank back and forth and got our bag of bream, most caught on the Atomic shad 40. The bite seemed to shut down with a few hours to go and we then had a 1.5hr drive back down the river for weigh in.

We were happy with our day 2 result, weighing in the 3rd biggest day 2 bag, and ended up moving up to 13th position, a much more respectable result from a field of 47 teams, of which only 3 were able to get their full 10 fish over the 2 days. As much as the fishing was tough it is such a beautiful river to fish with plenty of fish to keep you occupied, we ended up catching more perch than bream, and with a few small Jewies thrown in it was a good weekend of fishing.

Congratulations to Tony and Kyle Petie for a great win at a tough Venue.