The long awaited Walpole trip finally came on sunday as 6 mates and i headed down.
After a 6 hour drive and only getting lost once we arrived at Rest point Caravan Park.
Arriving at 4pm we set up the tents and went for a fish. We had a dinghy and 4 kayaks customised for fishing readily available.
The wind was up so we stayed in the channel between the Nornalup and Walpole inlets. Casting my new Zipbaits tiny khamsin i soon hooked up to first fish of the trip a little Salmon Trout - small but mighty.

Continued flicky my khamsin and picked up another little salmon until i hooked up to a nice little flatty in the shallows was approx 35cm and released.
I changed lure to concentrate on the snags for bream and put on a Sebile Crankster in the gold/black colour. I soon twitched it out of a healthy looking snag and picked up my first bream on a hardbody went about 23cm but still a first. I went on to pick up another couple of smallish bream before we headed in.

On the second day we found trolling proved effective trolling khamsins and hardz - we picked up several small salmon and bream with a mate getting the biggest bream of the trip at 31cm. One other mate picked upa little pinky that nailed a lure nearly as big as its self.

We made a trip into the nornalup and did some trolling on the flats near the ocean mouth were small salmon were prevelant and i also hooked a nice 43cm Flathead which cooked up nicely that night on a zipbaits Khamsin that i won at bream expo day. We also trolled up and double hook up of bream and pinkies and a solid skippy was also lost.

Later in the afternoon we went out infront of restpoint t have a troll and a bream in the yaks and fishing was slow as the boys headed in i stuck it out and found a good stretch of bank for trolling and picked up 17 bream on a khamsin in carmen red. 7 of which would have been size with the biggest 31cm and got great underwater release footage on that bream and many others which i will post later.

The next morning we headed out to the Frankland and launched just upstream from the Nornalup bridge.
Rocking up to the little jetty we noticed lots of bream and got some brilliant underwater footage of them.
We set of heading downstream and i picked up a smallish bream on the crankster while my mates got nothing

after a solid 1.5 hrs we headed back having not given up i shot across from the jetty to some snags hoping to pick up my first surface bream on a Berkley Scumdog.
First snag and first cast i saw a mushroom of water from the tail kick of a bream and a moment later another mushroom occurred and my lure disappeared under the surface of the water and i was on and landed my first poppered bream. Stoked as i was i gave it another 10 mins before we headed of and got one follow.

As soon as we got back to camp i headed out itching to try some more snags with my scumdog.
The fishing was hot with every second snag producing a follow i landed about 5 bream biggest was 27cm and had another 10 follows/ series of hits with no hook up.
One memorable hook up including the bream hitting it 5 times finally hooking up on the 6th.

On the last night me and a mate thought we'd give bait a crack seen as tho it was windy and not good yakking weather.
We hook some 25 cm bream casting out from the jetty. One of which put a big bow in my line and took me under the jetty alltho it looked like the bait was still sitting 30 metres out from the jetty.
We then cottoned on to the fact we could dropp stright down and get better results
So with a simplistic rig of just asmall circle hook we sent down some unweighted river prawns. This porved to be exciting fishing with visual hook ups and mad bustoffs.
With bait low i changed to a sinking stick bait a subdog. The plentiful Bait fish were attraced to the lure and had soon accidently jagged one and it proved to be a very useful live bait, catching high 20 cm bream.

All in all a solid trip no big bream but a bit of local knowledge and a bit of luck may prove useful next time.

Cheers Duffman

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