106cm Murray Cod
One night I had a dream that I caught a meter long Murray Cod. It was a vivid dream. Perhaps the dream was just in anticipation of the trip to Glenyon Dam I had planned the following day. In any case the next morning I headed off to the dam with great enthusiasm. I stopped along the way at the tackle store and bought the biggest landing net they had in the shop. The label on the net revealed it was rated to 30lb. I asked the assistant if he had a bigger net? He replied that 30lb was a big lump of a fish and that I would be lucky to land a cod that big.
Once on the water and after about an hour of casting my spinnerbait, I had a good strike. As soon as the fish hit I said to myself “This is it!” I somehow just knew I had my first ‘metery’. After a shorter fight than expected, I lead the behemoth of a fish into my new landing net. Whilst lifting the fish into the boat the net was stretched way beyond its’ recommended weight limit, but it somehow held. The cod measured 106cm. The DPI fish length/weight conversion scale shows a cod of 100cm weighs 22.1kg. So an conservative estimate of 25kg (55lb) sounds about right.
In an effort to release the fish I must have swam it beside the moving boat for over an hour, but to no avail. The big girl passed away. I think it may have been weakened by some kind of illness as the cods eyes were bulging a little. Popeye or exophthalmia is a condition sometimes seen with aquarium fish that causes the eyes to bulge. I usually release all my native fish captures, especially Murray Cod so was a little disappointed she died. That disappointment was short lived after tasting the fillets over a camp fire that night. Absolutely delicious! After returning home I sent the Cod’s otolith (ear) bones the DPI to have it aged. Gavin Butler at the Grafton DPI was nice enough to reply with his estimate of 17 years old.
I am not quite sure what to make of that sequence of events. But never the less that’s how it happened. Some days you are full of confidence and everything goes right. Well almost everything. The video of the fish I shot on my phone was pretty lousy and it is equally hard to take a good photo of yourself with a phone and a fish that big, when you are by yourself. When I got home I bought myself a Gopro.
Simon Fitzpatrick (Fitzy)
