Hi All,

Just came back from a couple of days in Walpole and what is usually a pretty productive trip was a little disappointing. I have fished this system over the last 10 years or so and have noticed what seems to be a decline in the amount of fish in that particular system, I'm sure if it just me not catching then someone will tell me. This trip I saw a number of things I haven't seen before one of them being really fine weed like the sort of stuff we see in areas of the sound and the Swan (generally fish don't like this particular weed) and in my experience this tends to happen when the system is quite unhealthy.

The other thing that nearly made me cry was the site of a blowie chasing my soft plastic back to the boat, this happened close to the river mouth but I had been losing tails off of plastics in areas close to Restpoint caravan park. We caught 5 KGW all around 30cm over 2 days of fishing admitidly I didn't try that hard to get fish but thats the good thing about this system usually you don't have to try that hard for bread and butter species. There was a pretty bad smell at times and the water was shitty brown colour, we did fish the run out tide which is not as productive but I usually still catch fish. I suppose I just wanted to ask if anyone else has seen it like this before or is this the beginning of something shit.

Cheers

PS didn't go out to sea so don't know what the channel is like.